


Raising a Kid For the End of the World

by SlytherinSedona



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Bunker Fluff, Dean has a a daughter, Drugs, Get some tissues, Good Parent Castiel, Parent Dean Winchester, Parent Sam Winchester, Self-Harm, Suicide Attempt, The Family Business, Winchester Daughter, Winchester Family - Freeform, ass kicking, basically this is really sad
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-20
Updated: 2016-03-08
Packaged: 2018-04-16 07:52:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 12
Words: 27,609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4617294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SlytherinSedona/pseuds/SlytherinSedona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean had a child while on a case. When her mother dies during birth, Dean, Sam, and Cas take Olivia Samantha Winchester back to the bunker to raise the newest member of the Winchester family. Everything is going just fan-freaking-tastic until Crowley shows up. </p><p>This is the story of how they raised a hunter, not a daughter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Song of the chapter: Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears.

One

 

The first time she realizes that her father is the Dean Winchester, Olivia is six. There was no rhyme or reason as to why the two brothers had decided to keep the final copies of what Chuck had written about them, but there it was. Buried deep in the back of the library in the bunker.  
Olivia finds the typed pages well before dinnertime. By the time Uncle Sammy is calling her in for dinner, she’s well past the house fire that started it all, and past Sam leaving for college. It’s difficult to understand, and there are more words that she doesn’t know than ones that she does, but she manages to catch enough pieces to put together what happened. The lady who would’ve been her grandma died. The man who would’ve been her grandpa made Daddy and Uncle Sammy into the most famous hunters in history. Daddy and Sammy are Dean and Sam Winchester.  
“Olivia?” It’s her dad, poking his head through the doorway in search of his daughter. His eyebrows knit together in the way that makes him look a lot older than he really is, and makes her giggle. Daddy looks a lot older than the rest of the dads in her class, a fact that she figured out early on.  
“What do you have there, sweetheart?” He walks over and kneels beside her, sliding the paper-clipped pages from her small hands. Olivia giggles more, and gestures for him to move in closer.  
“Daddy?” She asks, her voice barely containing the wonder trapped in it. He’s still focused on the pages before him, but looks up at her after a minute. He always pays attention to what she said.  
“What is it, honey?”  
“Are you really Dean Winchester?” The question catches him off guard, and he’s quiet for a while, and Olivia is suddenly afraid that she’s made Daddy sad. She’s seen him sad before, like when she asked where her mommy was, or why she didn’t have grandparents to bring to school on Grandparents’ Day last month. But somehow this was different. This is his eyes clouding over, and his shoulders caving in like he’s holding the entire world with them.  
“Yeah. I am.” And then her mega-watt grin is back, and she winds her arms around his middle, clutching at her father. The movement shocks Dean, but he recovers quickly and hugs her back with just as much enthusiasm, the unexpected affection taking his mind away from her discovery.  
“Hey, hey, what’s this about?” Dean peels her off enough that he can get a good look at his daughter. She’s every inch a Winchester, there’s no doubting that. The same forest green eyes that they all seem to have, and her father’s freckles dusted across her cheeks and nose. Her blonde hair hangs down into her eyes, reminding him of how his mother looked once upon a time. There’s no doubting that she’s his daughter.  
“You’re my hero, Daddy.” Dean doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t need to. He knew that Cas told her bed time stories about their adventures, leaving out the all important detail of who exactly the heroes were. Everything he’d done to keep her as far away from this world as possible, and it all comes crumbling down because he’d been stupid enough to keep the damn prophecies.  
They stay like that until Sam comes bursting in, ready to tell them that dinner is nearly cold. He stops when he sees his brother clutching his only niece like a lifeline, and smiles a tight-lipped smile before shutting the door.

There weren’t going to be any bedtime stories that night.

 

After a few weeks, Olivia starts wondering why her Uncle Cas won’t tell her bedtimes stories anymore. It all comes to a head one night, when she bursts out into tears right as her Uncle Cas is pouring in bubbles for her bath. Crying is for babies, she knows that. But she can’t help it.  
“Wh-what d-did I d-d-do, Uncle C-cas? I’m sorry, I’ll b-be better I s-s-swear!” And then she’s sobbing into her uncle’s arms, crying like she did the time she fell down the last few stairs and had to wear a cast on her arm for a month. Hot tears keep bubbling out, and she keeps crying because it’s her fault Cassie won’t tell her bedtime stories anymore. She doesn’t care that she’s being a baby, or that if the other kids in her class knew they would make fun of her for the rest of the year; she just wants her uncle to tell her the stories again.  
“Olivia, you have done nothing.” He attempts to soothe her, and only succeeds in making her cry harder. She had to have done something, or else he wouldn’t have stopped telling her about the Winchesters, and all the ways they saved the world and all the people on it. Both of them are so absorbed in her crying that neither of them notices her father and uncle back from the grocery store, arms laden down with plastic bags. Alarm is clearly written into both of their features, and for a moment, Cas swears that he can see Sam’s hand moving away from the gun he keeps stashed in his waistband.  
“What the hell happened?” Cas looks up to Sam and Dean helplessly, Olivia still sobbing in his arms. Within seconds Dean is there, plastic bags forgotten, and lifting her out of Castiel’s arms and cradling her in his own. The expression on his face is enough to make Cas wish that he still had his grace with him, and he could fix whatever had broken inside of his niece. But Heaven had never been that kind to any of them.  
“Liv, sweetheart, talk to Daddy, what happened?” For a moment it almost sounds as if Dean is the one crying. In between choked sobs and sniffles, Olivia gasps out another version of what she had told Cas only minutes before.  
“I d-didn’t ma-mean to Daddy! I’m so-sorry f-for asking if y-y-you were D-dean Winch-che-st-ter.” The syllables are broken in between her cries, and all three men in the room can feel their hearts breaking for her with every breath. Sam looks away when a tear manages to slide its way down his older brother’s cheek.  
“Oh honey, you didn’t do anything. That’s Daddy’s fault okay? Not yours, never yours.” Wiping at the tears on her face with desperate hands, he rocks with her in time with both of their cries, trying to smother down the sadness he’s caused in his little girl. Every part of him hurts, because he knows that she’d sad because of him. If he had just acted normal in the library when she’d asked if he was Dean Winchester, or even just been honest with her in the beginning then they wouldn’t be here.  
“I’ll d-do anyth-thing, just p-please don’t be m-mad at me!” She wails, and Dean clutches his daughter tighter. God this was worse than any of the shit he’s ever faced. Dean Winchester, the man who came back from both Purgatory and Hell, having known more pain than any person had a right to, and this was it. This was worse than losing so many of the people he had lost. This was it. Knowing that he’d caused his daughter pain.  
“No, no, Liv, it’s okay, this is my fault, you hear? I’m the one that wouldn’t let Uncle Cas tell you stories anymore. You didn’t do anything, baby.” He kisses the top of her head, and continues to rock her back and forth, repeating various forms of the same sentence over and over again until her sobs turn to cries, and her cries to muffled sniffles. When he thinks that she’s calmed down he begins to softly hum the same song that Mary once sung to him. It’s sad and off key, but it works, and soon Olivia’s breathing has evened out into equal, slow puffs of breath into the crook of his neck. They sit like that for God knows how long, Olivia held in her father’s arms.  
Eventually Dean gets up, standing as gently as possible as to not wake her. Bath completely forgotten, he walks to her room, flipping on the nightlight in the corner before pulling back the sheets and settling her into bed. After she’s tucked in, and he checks the salt lines on the windows and doors just like he does every night, only then does he allow himself to relax, the heavy stoop of his shoulders the only sign of how much this weighed on him. In one movement he sinks into the armchair in the corner of the room as quietly as he can, and rubs a hand across his face. If he had known how much the stories had meant to her, then he would have never told Cas to stop telling her stories, or insisted that Sam read to her exclusively from the shelf full of children’s books. To be honest, it made him sick to know that he’d been that selfish. Who was he to take away something that gave his only child joy simply because it reminded him too much of all the times he’d fucked up?  
Slowly, he dozes off in the same chair that he’s fallen asleep in before too many times. He doesn’t dream that night, unsurprisingly. He never does when he falls asleep in Olivia’s room.

Even though he doesn’t dream, Dean doesn’t sleep that night.

 

Things start to get easier after that. Cas starts telling her the stories again, and even though it’s not the same now that she knows that the Dean Winchester is her father, it’s still nice. October bleeds into November, and soon Olivia is swept up into the flurry of Thanksgiving that all the other kids in her class are, and when she comes home proudly toting a hand drawn picture of a hand-turkey, Dean smiles brightly and laughs, putting it up on the refrigerator along with the other drawings Olivia has made. It goes up next to the one of their family, crayon colored stick figures whose only identifying features are the different colors used; Cas with messy black lines for hair, and electric blue eyes. Sam with long brown hair and green eyes. Dean with sunshine yellow hair and the same green eyes. The last figure is of Olivia, pink triangle dress drawn on, and three-pronged crown on her head. Dean has to laugh at this, because since she started drawing, the same three-pronged crown has appeared on her head.  
It’s Sunday morning, and as usual, Dean is in the kitchen of the bunker making pancakes. Olivia is helping by cracking eggs into the bowl of batter, (getting a few pieces of shell in which Dean then has to fish out) while Sam reads the newspaper in silence, and Cas fiddles with the radio (a fascination which started two years ago and never really went away).  
“Hey, Uncle Sammy,” The question comes when Olivia is absentmindedly stirring at the batter, coating the sides of the bowl with it.  
“Who’s Bobby?” The spoon Sam is using to stir his coffee with clatters noisily to the table, creating the only sound in the sudden silence. For a moment, everyone in the room is frozen. Then Sam looks over at Dean, and they both have the same look of shock on their faces. They intended to tell Olivia about Bobby, of course. Ideally, when she was older, and preferably when she had no knowledge about the supernatural world. Obviously neither was going to happen.  
“Bobby was a very special part of our family.” Sam says after some hesitation. He’s looking at his cup of coffee like it’s going to swallow him whole, and for a minute, he wishes that it will. At least then he wouldn’t have to explain the only man he’s ever considered a father to his niece that can’t even see over the countertop.  
“Like you and Uncle Cas?” He doesn’t dare look over at his older brother. He doesn’t need to. To know that Dean is a second away from shutting down completely, the sudden influx of memories they’d carefully stowed away feeling more and more like a gunshot every second. This wasn’t how she was supposed to find out about Bobby. About Ellen. About Jo. Ash. Adam. John. Mary. The list kept going and going and going because there were so many people that Sam and Dean couldn’t save. That they didn’t save. They were all pieces of some sick, twisted up puzzle that somehow was their family, and how did you explain a ghost to a six year old, when she only found out about death when the pet goldfish died and Dean had to flush it down the toilet? So he settles for the easy answer, and swallows it down with too hot coffee that burns the back of his throat. And he doesn’t mind.  
“Yeah, Liv. Like me and Cas.”

 

When Dean first brought Olivia back to the bunker, the car left the hospital with one less person on board than when it had left. He didn’t talk about Elizabeth often. She wasn’t anything special really; a friend that he’d managed to maintain contact with after a hunt. She’d call once in a while about a possible hunt, sometimes right, sometimes wrong. Mostly she just called to hear another voice.  
She wasn’t much. But she’d given him Olivia. And that alone was more than Dean ever deserved.


	2. Chapter 2

Two

 

When Olivia turns eight, things start to get weird. Sam chalks it up to Dean coping with his little girl growing up. Cas chalks it up to Dean just being Dean. Olivia chalks it up to her Daddy getting older. His smile stopped sitting quite so brightly on his lips. It’s still there, coming in flashes whenever she brings home drawings (no more stick figures), or when she comes bounding up to hug him when he gets home from the garage. Sam notices, but says nothing. Olivia was getting older – she stopped drawing stick figures, instead drawing slightly more advanced two-dimensional figures. She gave up on wearing pink, siting it as “too girly”, and changed her favorite color to something more grownup (purple). Her baby teeth were falling out faster than either of them remembered happening when they were her age, and by this point he was sure that she knew that they were the ones that put the money under her pillow at night.  
A scream cuts into Sam’s thoughts, and for a moment, he’s back on a hunt, and there’s some soul-sucking son of a bitch after someone, and his hand shoots out to grab the gun stashed on the underside of the kitchen table, before he’s sprinting up the stairs to Olivia’s room. Steps echo his own right behind him, and from the sound, he figures it to be Cas. The two of them move towards her room in unison, and a glance behind him confirms it. Cas is clutching his angel blade in his right hand, knuckles having lost all color. There’s the same terror on his face that Sam is sure is on his own, and within seconds Sam is throwing open the door to Olivia’s room, and immediately lowers his gun at the sight that greets him.  
The eight year old is standing on her bed, jumping up and down as she points at something on the floor in what appears to be fear and very apparent horror. Cas’s head snaps between the floor and Olivia so fast that it’s comical, and Sam has to hide a smile, despite the fact that his heart is still hammering from what could have been something attacking Olivia.  
“Sam, I, I don’t understand. Why was she screaming?” Cas questions. It becomes abundantly clear seconds later.  
“Get it, get it!” She screeches, pointing at the floor. Upon further investigation, the thing she’s pointing at is in fact a spider, barely as big as his fingernail. A laugh escapes his throat as he grasps a piece of paper, and scoops the creature onto the paper.  
“Cas, sometimes a girl encounters a bug. And when that happens, this is what you do. Now go open the door.” Cas obediently follows Sam’s directions, watching him in half wonder, half confusion as Sam takes the creature and deposits it outside. When he comes back in and closes the door, Cas is still staring with his head tilted slightly to the side.  
“Sam, that was not a bug. That was an arachnid.” Sam laughs harder than he has ever since he first noticed something wrong with Dean.

 

The day Olivia was born, Sam cried.

Dean brought Olivia home, and the second he placed her in Sam’s arms, he started to cry. Mostly because he was holding a human life in his hands, all six pounds, ten ounces of it more precious than he could have ever imagined. A perfectly normal baby girl, the doctors had said. For some reason Sam can’t take his eyes off of her, even as a few tears manage to escape the corners of his eyes and dribble down his cheeks. After everything that he’d been through, after the demon blood, after Ruby, after being Lucifer’s vessel, after opening the fucking gates of hell, somehow he still became an uncle.  
Dean lands a hand on his shoulder and clears his throat while looking slightly flustered.  
“We, uh, named her Olivia. Olivia Samantha Winchester.” 

 

The day after Dean brings Olivia home, Sam goes to the bookstore and comes back with an armload of books about caring for newborn babies. Dean snorts his fair share of laughter at this, but picks up one of the books nonetheless and reads it cover to cover. Cas on the other hand, regards the books with the utmost seriousness, pouring through the books like they’re a Bible and he’s a born again Christian. His enthusiasm for the new baby makes Sam and Dean shake their heads.  
It’s slow learning at first. Dean struggles to recall all the things about babies that he once learned while caring for Sam, and the two of them struggle to adapt to life with a fourth person that requires constant attention. They manage to survive changing diapers and driving Olivia around in the Impala at two o’clock in the morning when she won’t fall asleep any other way. They learn to live on less sleep, and Sam only has to get vomited on once to remember to always burp the baby after feeding her.

 

“Dean, she won’t stop crying!” Sam calls out, desperately trying to calm the screaming baby in his arms. So far he’d tried everything that the books say to do; rocking her, giving her a bottle; changing her diaper, burping her, and none of it seems to have any affect on her. Within seconds Dean is next to him, deftly lifting her out of Sam’s arms and cradling her in his own. He rocks her back and forth, murmuring soothing words in a low voice. If anything her cries get louder, bouncing off the walls until their heads are starting to pound. Dean cringes and continues to rock her back and forth, hoping that she’ll calm down.  
“Dean, let me.” Cas extends his arms for the baby, and Dean glances at him with hesitation before he hands her over. Cas has only held Olivia a handful of times before, most of which involved Dean hovering over his shoulder and monitoring every move. The second she is settled in his arms, the cries begin to quiet down until they’re completely gone, the only evidence she was crying in the first place is the red color of her face. Both Sam and Dean stare at Cas slack-jawed, and all he does is grin back at them in response. Even though his grace was almost completely gone, he could see this child’s soul. It was the brightest thing he had ever encountered, and that was saying something. He’d been around for it all. Mesopotamia. Rome. The fall of Constantinople. The Crusades. All the people he’d encountered, all of the souls he’d seen, and still none of them compared to the creature lying in his arms.  
“How did you do that?” Dean demands, sinking down into the couch. Cas continues to rock her in his arms, a toothless smile making it’s way onto Olivia’s face. Cas’s grin gets bigger as he looked at her smile.  
“I don’t know.” Dean shakes his head in amazement, and raises his hands in surrender. If he can keep Olivia from crying, then by all means he was going to let as hold her.  
“Well then keep holding her until we can put her to sleep. Maybe Sam and I will be able to get more than a few hours tonight.” If Cas hears them, he doesn’t acknowledge them. 

 

It takes eight months for Olivia to finally sleep through the night uninterrupted. When Dean wakes up in the morning, he feels well rested, and he’s halfway through a kickass yawn when it hits him why he feels this way. In just boxers and a t-shirt, he all but sprints to the nursery, only to stumble his way in and find his daughter asleep in her crib still, blankets resting in nearly the same position as when he put her to sleep last night. Without him realizing it, a smile breaks across his features, and he backs out of the room before he can wake her up.  
Sam collides with him, apparently having woken up and had the same revelation that Dean was currently having. A look inside the room to see all the salt lines and sigils still intact is all it takes to make Sam walk quietly out of the room in the same manner as Dean, and then break into an identical grin. It makes the two of them look years younger, and for a second they’re able to imagine that their lives are normal.  
“She finally slept through the night.”  
“That’s my girl.” The pride is so clear in Dean’s voice that Sam is sure no father has ever felt like this before. Even Sam can feel the pride of a father welling up under his skin; it’s unfamiliar and scares him a little to be honest, but this is the Winchesters, raising a baby. And for once in their life they are doing an okay job at it.  
“What’d I miss?” Cas walks up to them softly, all of them having adopted the same quiet walk after the first couple of times they put her to sleep and kept waking her up on the way out. Sam and Dean’s grin gets bigger, and they begin to herd the angel down the stairs before they wake her up by accident. For the first time since Olivia was born, the three of them have their morning coffee uninterrupted, each of them reveling in the fact that holy shit, it’s actually fucking quiet. Cas pours himself a bowl of cereal - the sugary kind that targeted at kids - and the other half of Team Free Will follows place because why the hell not, the sun is shining, the day is new, and Olivia slept through the night all by herself.  
They’re about to pick up their spoons to start eating when they hear her start crying.

 

Dean begins to worry when Olivia turns two, and still hasn’t spoken a word. Every doctor they’ve seen has said the same things – she’ll talk when she’s ready, this is just her developing, or the worst, this is normal. This isn’t normal, and he couldn’t give a fuck about when anyone else’s kid says their first words, when this is Olivia they’re talking about, this is his daughter. They’ve all tried to get her to talk countless times, each of them talking to her in silly voices and trying to get her to say something, anything, to no affect. She still won’t talk.  
She’s three when she says her first words. Dean is making pancakes, and Cas sits at the table with Olivia as she colors in a coloring book, attention held by the cartoons playing on the TV set. They’re the ridiculous ones with enough dumb humor to keep her laughing and occupied. Sam’s keys and footsteps can be heard from down the hall. He left twenty minutes ago to pick up more flour. This is their Sunday.  
Sam walks in, hanging his keys up on the rack by the door. They put it up last year when none of them could find their keys, only to discover that Olivia had taken them all. Dean laughed then, and came home with a key rack from the hardware store.  
“Good morning Uncle Sammy.” Three heads whip around to face the three year old at the table, none of them quite sure that the words they just heard are really coming from her. They all freeze, and then Dean is running over to her, picking her up and slinging her into his arms. His daughter has just said her first words. Cas walks over and kisses the top of her head. He can’t really see her soul that well anymore, but on this certain occasion, the air around her is shimmering white and yellow.  
“You hear that, Sammy!” They turn around to look at the other Winchester brother, only to find him still frozen, his mouth dropped in shock. Slowly, a smile begins to work its way onto Sam’s face, and then he’s so happy that he thinks he’s going to burst. His heart squeezes in the same way it has the few times he’s seen his mother, in the same way it does when he looks at pictures of him and Dean. This is love, Sam realizes, taking the toddler into his arms. This is love with hair the color of sunshine, freckles already appearing across the bridge of her nose. This is love with a baby-toothed grin, and his brother’s eyes. This is love, the first words she’s ever spoken directed at him.  
After that, Olivia won’t shut up, talking until they put her to bed. For the first time, she asks Cas to tell her the bedtime story about Team Free Will. The three men gather around in the room, each of them listening as Cas tells the story of the three of them saving the world, making them sound more like superheroes than two humans and an angel. Soon Olivia begins to nod off, and the three of them take their turns at kissing her goodnight.  
Dean’s leaving when he hears it.  
“Night, night, Daddy.” His voice catches in his throat, because he’s seen and heard a lot of beautiful things in his time, but this has to be the winner. He stops at the doorway and flips on the night light, then does one last glance around the room to make sure the salt lines are still in tact.  
“Goodnight, sweetheart.”  
Sam isn’t the only one that cries that night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading y'all. I appreciate comments & kudos so much! Song of the chapter: The Show by Lenka


	3. Chapter 3

Dean knows that something is wrong the second he wakes up. The air feels charged in the way it does right before a big lightening storm. And sure enough, the mark on his arm is glowing just enough to make his heart drop in his stomach.  
The Mark of Cain has been the last thing on his mind since Olivia was born. Maybe it was because there was so much love inside of him that it made it impossible for the mark to make him want to do those things. He’d known that something was changing inside of him; it wasn’t exactly something that you could miss. The way he was quick to snap at Sam and Cas, even quick to snap at Olivia’s teachers. It was coming back. And there was no way to tell what kind of damage would be done this time.

 

After that, Dean starts wearing only long sleeves. He does it even though he knows that Cas has to be seeing right through him. His grace may be gone, but that doesn’t mean that he’s completely inept. Cas could spot something wrong with Dean from miles away.  
Sam on the other hand tries to corner him. Catches him in between his shifts at the animal hospital and Dean’s shifts at the local garage. He makes a point to block all the doorways so that Dean has no choice but to talk to him.  
“Just talk to me, Dean. Something is off with you.” Dean doesn’t answer, and Sam slams his hand against the space of wall next to Dean’s head. The anger that flashes in Dean’s eyes is enough to send Sam reeling back like he’s been burn, this isn’t his brother. This isn’t Dean who makes Mickey Mouse shaped pancakes for his daughter, or buys her Barbie dolls with overpriced frilly skirts. This isn’t Olivia’s dad, this is something else entirely, and it scares the shit out of him.  
“Fuck off, Sam.” Dean grunts and pushes past his brother, using more force than necessary. A few seconds later, Sam can hear the telltale purr of the Impala’s engine, and the screech of the tires as he speeds away. If anything, Dean has only confirmed his suspicions that something is terribly wrong with his brother. But Sam swallows his words, and picks up a book to read until he has to go back to the animal hospital.

 

It’s midway into Olivia’s third grade year when they get the call. It was an odd day to begin with – Sam was off of work, and the manager of the garage had sent Dean home because there wasn’t anything to work on. Cas, as usual, was home reading. The phone rings, and Cas rushes to answer, just as excited at the first time they let him answer the house phone.  
“Hello?” Cas presses the phone closer to his ear to wait for whoever is on the other line.  
“Hello, is this Dean Winchester?” The phone is yanked out of his hands and into Dean’s, who holds it up and speaks into the phone with his authoritative voice that’s equally as charming as it is commanding.  
“Speaking.”  
“Hi, I’m Susan Gardner, the principal here at Lebanon Elementary. We have your daughter Olivia here in the office, and we’d really appreciate it if you would come down here as soon as possible.”  
“Is there a problem?” The words immediately put him on edge; there are so many things that can go wrong these days.  
“No, Olivia was just involved in an altercation with another student. We’d appreciate it if you’d come down, sir.” He wants so badly to tell the lady to shove her bullshit altercation where the sun don’t shine, and to hang up the damn phone until it’s time for Cas to pick Olivia up from school. But he doesn’t, and somehow manages to bark out an “I’ll be right there”.  
“What happened?” Sam asks, defenses up. The house phone is rarely used for anything other than to order take out or pizza once in a while. It’s a formality really, and he can count on one hand the times they have gotten a phone call on it.  
“Olivia got into a fight with another kid. I have to go up to the school.” Dean snatches his jacket off the coat rack and is slamming the door behind him before they can ask anything else. The loud slam echoes through the bunker, and makes Cas flinch back at the sound. Sam stands his ground, but his frown deepens. There’s something really wrong with his brother.

 

The scene that greets Olivia’s father when he walks into the office is not something he ever wanted to see. She’s sitting in one of the scratchy, rust colored armchairs in the same outfit she left school in this morning. It’s a purple sundress and shoes that are more pretty than they are functional, and a flicker of humor runs through him before it’s gone. Cas must’ve picked it out for her. The expression on her face says it all; Olivia knew she was in trouble, and she was not happy about it. There’s a boy sitting next to her, tissue clutched to his nose to wipe up the blood that’s steadily dripping from it. Dean can’t help the small amount of pride that wells up in him at the sight of his daughter being able to dish out a beating.  
“Mr. Winchester, if you will.” The woman behind the desk gestures for him to sit down, and for a split second Dean considers just picking up his daughter and leaving. He doesn’t.  
“Olivia was sent to my office when her teacher informed me that she had hit another student repeatedly after he said something to her. Neither one will tell me what was said.” Dean glances over to the little shit sitting in the chair next to his daughter with anger in his eyes. Olivia was not a violent child. The most violent thing she’d ever done was the time she shoved Cas just a little too hard in a game of tag, and caught him just the slightest bit off balance. His daughter was not a violent child, and whatever that boy said to her was bad enough that it made her that way.  
“I’ve told Olivia that she’s has to write a letter to both Jacob and her teacher to apologize for hitting him and disrupting the class. Do I make myself clear?” The kids’ head nod mechanically, and she claps suddenly, making everyone in the room flinch.  
“Alright. Olivia, why don’t you give me a few minutes to talk to your father? And Jacob, you can return to the nurse’s office.” The two kids file out of the room, Olivia glaring daggers at the back of his neck. It’s the closest he’s ever seen his daughter come to being angry. Once they leave, the woman folds her hands on the table and starts to speak.  
“Mr. Winchester, is there anything I should know about Olivia’s home life?”  
“Excuse me?” His response comes out more rudely than he intended, but he doesn’t mind. Screw this bitch for having the audacity to ask him about their home.  
“What I mean to say is, I understand that Olivia doesn’t have a mother. Not having that mother figure in a girl’s life can often lead to difficulty – striking out in anger, rebelling, not making friends.”  
“You don’t know anything about Olivia’s mother. Not. One. Thing.” Suddenly Dean is angrier than he’s been in a long time, because no one has ever had the balls to question Olivia’s mother directly to his face. Elizabeth stayed out of all discussions. Period.  
“Mr. Winchester, we’re on the same side here. We both want Olivia to succeed in the best way possible, and I’m just trying to get to the bottom of the problem so that we can fix it.” He almost feels sorry for the woman like this. Working eight to five, six days a week. Dealing with the type of parents that he’s being right now. But then he’s reminded of the look on his daughter’s face, and any ounce of remorse that he had for this woman is gone.  
“Can we go now?” She sighs in resignation, but nods.  
“Yes. I’d suggest keeping her home and talking to her about this tomorrow. Have a good day, Mr. Winchester.” Her last words are lost on him as he leaves, and Olivia looks up from where she’s sitting in the living room. There’s not a mark on her, other than where she must’ve hit him with her knuckles. He reaches out and takes her hand lightly, taking care not to crush her with the amount of rage that inside of him. He wants that lady regret ever even talking to his daughter.  
They don’t talk until Olivia is buckled into the back seat of the Impala, and they’re well on the way back to the bunker.  
“I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at your principal and that kid.” He tries to keep his grip on the steering wheel neutral, but the thought that Olivia might think he’s mad at her brings up a new round of anger.  
“I know.”

 

“Kitchen. Now.” Olivia is marching ahead of him, little shoes stomping on the floor. The expression on Dean’s face is one she’s only seen on her father’s face a handful of time before, and never directed at her. She stomps into the living room, and makes a point to flop down onto the couch and bury her head into the cushions so she doesn’t have to look at him.  
“She got into a fight.” Dean states before either one of the men can both asking questions. If the situation wasn’t so surprising, the expression on Cas’s face would be almost comical. The entire situation would have been funny. Here was Olivia Samantha Winchester, who was so loving and caring that she cried when her goldfish died when she was seven, and begged her uncles not to kill spiders but to take them outside and return them to their home. There was not a single bone in her body that could ever wish to do harm to anything or anybody, and yet here she was; bruised knuckles and dried blood still on her hands from where she hadn’t scrubbed hard enough.  
The couch sinks in next to where she’s sitting, and her father’s hand begins to rub her back. Finally she sits up, staring sullenly at the floor.  
“Talk.”  
“It wasn’t my fault! Jacob is the meanest one in my class! All the other girls were talking about how their moms pick out their clothes, and I told them that Uncle Cas helps me pick out mine when we go shopping! And then Jacob said it was because I didn’t have a mom, and that my family wasn’t a real family.” There’s silence once she finishes, and as she looks at both of her uncles and her father in turn, all she can see is the guilt-ridden looks they give her.  
“So I hit him.” Sam takes in the look on her face, how she looks so much like Dean did when they were kids, and he got into a fight. Set jaw, eyes blazing with passion beyond her age. How she looks like she knows that what she did was wrong, but she had to.  
“Why don’t you go play upstairs kiddo. I’ll call you down when dinner is ready.” Sam interrupts, and Olivia nods, picking up her backpack. Tears are about to start pouring from her eyes, but she stalks up the stairs, and they can hear the soft sound of her door shutting after her.  
“She got into a fight?” Dean nods, rubbing at his jaw the same way he does whenever he’s too tired to know what to think anymore. Sam looks at his brother and for the first time it strikes him that Dean doesn’t look like his brother anymore. He looks like a father, with the same worn down expression that seemed to be permanently etched into his features. This is having a child.  
“What do we do?” Dean could care less about what they do from here. He just hopes that he never lays eyes on that woman again, or there’s no promise that he’ll be able to control himself. The three men fall silent again, each trying to think of where to go from here. Punishing Olivia was not an option – she was just trying to defend her family.  
“Well, I don’t know about you too, but I believe it’s time for some ice cream.” Cas says as he shoulders on his trench coat. He’s been living in the bunker for eight years now, but he can’t bring himself to give up the trench coat yet.  
“Ice cream?” Dean says it like it’s a curse word, like the very idea that this is something to celebrate for appalls him.  
“Dean,” Cas starts, putting a hand on his shoulder, “you can’t punish her for wanting to protect her family. Also, I believe it is customary to get ice cream to celebrate an event.”  
So they go out for ice cream. And Olivia celebrates with a scoop of Dutch Chocolate in one of the cones with the rainbow sprinkles. The four of them laugh about it, and Olivia is happy because she has the best family in the entire world. Her uncle is Castiel, angel of Thursday, defender of Heaven. Her other uncle and father are Sam and Dean Winchester, saving the world one person at a time. So when they’re walking back down the street towards the Impala, and she’s holding her uncles’ hands in her own, she doesn’t hesitate when she says,  
“Jacob was a son of a bitch anyways.”

They decide that she doesn’t have to put a quarter in the swear jar.


	4. Chapter 4

It’s February 17. Olivia’s ninth birthday. Instead of buying a cake, Cas, who has taken to watching the cooking channel, decides to bake her one. It’s a momentous affair, which probably makes more of a mess than should have been possible for just one cake. But it’s chocolate, her favorite, with blue icing (he hadn’t quite gotten the hang of the whole mixing colors thing yet, and didn’t want to mess up her cake).  
When it’s time for cake and presents, and Olivia blows out all nine candles on the cake, she grins.  
“What’d you wish for honey?” Dean asks, sliding a poorly wrapped package across the table. None of them proved to be any good at wrapping presents, even after watching too many online videos on the best way. So Sam settles for present wrapping duty.  
“It’s a secret, Daddy! If I tell you, it won’t come true!” Carefully picking at the tape, Olivia pulls the wrapping paper off, revealing a small box. She pulls the lid off, and picks up the object inside. It’s a bracelet, heavy and expensive looking. There are charms dangling from it in several places, but she doesn’t know what any of them are. Some of the girls in her class have charm bracelets, with things like hearts dangling from pretty silver chains. But this is different. It looks grown up.  
“That’s from Sammy.”  
“What is it?” She asks, picking it up. It slides easily over her small hands, and Cas reaches across the table to tighten it.  
“It’s a charm bracelet. To keep you safe.” She doesn’t really see how a star inside a circle will keep her safe, or how the cross or any of the other odd symbols are going to keep her safe. She knows what’s out there. Monsters and spirits and demons. That’s why there was salt in her room. To keep the monsters out.  
“It’s pretty.” And it is. She’s sure the other kids in her class will be more than jealous at her pretty bracelet. It’s like the one Mrs. Davis wears when she sees her grade papers. It makes a tinkling sound every time her wrist moves. All the other girls want one. And now she has one.  
She gets other things. Cas gives her the full Harry Potter series. They’re thicker than the dictionaries at school, but he assures her that she’ll love them. Dean gives her a brand new art set, complete with paints and pastels. She’s outgrown crayons really, and even Dean can see that she’s good at drawing.  
“You’ll have to make Sam a picture that he can hang up at the animal hospital. And one I can put up at work.” She squeals when she starts drawing with the colored pencils, amazed at how much better the color is than when she uses markers and crayons. Dean grins and ruffles her hair, pulling it out of the braid Cas put it in earlier. She’s growing up, faster than he cares to count.   
She still likes Barbie dolls, but doesn’t care to admit that to anyone but Cas. Drawing takes up more of her time, and the only times she’ll draw stick figures anymore is to make a joke. The drawings are good, looking more lifelike every time. Even her art teacher notices, hanging up the drawing in the classroom like trophies. She’s rapidly leaving the little girl stages.

 

At the same time that Olivia is growing up, Dean is undergoing some changes of his own.   
The Mark glows every day now. It should frighten him, but it doesn’t. He gets into fights a lot more often too. Going sometimes two, even three towns over to pick petty bar fights with men stronger than he is. He always wins, but it does nothing to help tame whatever is inside of him. Just barely takes the edge off.   
Sam and Cas are concerned. He knows that. He snaps at them enough that family dinners are becoming more and more tense. Olivia is the only one who seems to escape the tirades. Between school, and now the ballet classes they agreed to let her go to, Dean begins to purposely schedule his shifts at the garage for when she is home, afraid that one day he won’t be able to control himself from becoming a monster.  
A monster. Such a fucking stupid term for what this is. He’s been through this before. The Mark, becoming a demon. Being cured. There was only one real way this ends, and he knew that. He knows that.  
Crowley starts becoming more of a fixture in his life. He summons him and talks to him whenever no one is home, making plans for when they will meet up again. Crowley doesn’t approve of course. What’s the point in staying for his daughter when he already avoids her like he’s already gone? Dean hates himself for it, and knows that deep down, Crowley’s fucking right. And he hates himself even more for avoiding his daughter.

 

Elizabeth Gracey. Aged twenty six years old. There were cattle mutilations in the area. Strange weather patterns. A series of murders. Reports of sulfur. Textbooks demon sighting.  
When Sam, Dean, and Cas found her, she was tied up in the basement of an abandoned warehouse. Multiple lacerations, five dislocated fingers, several broken ribs, and a stab wound to the leg. Half dead. They took her to the hospital, and as soon as she was reported stable, left her nothing but a note with Dean’s number attached to the bottom. She’d been possessed multiple times; killed several people. She called once to tell Dean that they were taking her to one of the psychiatric wards for hallucinations and probable schizophrenia.  
Dean heard from her a year later. She was out of the psych ward – finally having convinced the doctors that what she had what was most likely the worst bout of PTSD they’d ever seen. But she knew the truth she said – she had been possessed by demons. Actual demons. They’d made her kill people, do terrible things. And now she wanted to stop them. At first, the brothers made a point of telling her to give it up, to try and get her life back to where it had been before. But Elizabeth was adamant that she was going to help.  
It took over a month of convincing before they finally gave her the rundown. What to look for in the papers and the news, how to protect herself; the standard issue routine. They put her strictly on research, not that there was any problem with that. Elizabeth was clear that she wanted no part in killing anything, but she would help Sam and Dean in any way she could.  
So she called. Often. Sometimes she had a case, sometimes she didn’t. Mostly just to hear another voice, she finally admitted to Dean one night. Over time, their friendship blossomed. And it was never anything more than that until Dean decided to take her to a bar. It was purely platonic, and they were drunk. Four weeks later, she’s calling him telling him the test came back positive. Neither of them loved each other as anything beyond brother and sister, and abortion was so far off the table of possibility that it was clear from the get go what they were going to do.  
They moved her into the bunker immediately. No Winchester was ever going to be in danger, much less the woman that was carrying his daughter. They did everything they could to protect her, moving Cas in so that there would always be someone to watch over her. Every possible precaution was taken. Cas blessed her as best that an angel with borrowed grace can, and constantly stayed alert to ward off any incoming threats. The first few months were bad – the pregnancy took its toll on Elizabeth, but after the first trimester, things got better. The morning sickness faded. The baby grew.  
It was the last three months where things finally went to shit. Elizabeth started feeling badly, but chalked it up to flu. When it came time to deliver the baby, she had pneumonia. The doctors said that there was a fifty-fifty chance that the baby would be healthy. Elizabeth told them to save the baby. 

Olivia Samantha Winchester is born on a Wednesday night at 11:47 p.m.  
It’s raining outside. She weighs six pounds, ten ounces. She is perfectly healthy.  
Elizabeth Alice Gracey dies at 11:52 p.m. She holds her daughter for three minutes. It’s long enough for her and Dean to agree on a name. Her lungs fill up with fluid, and she drowns in it.  
The Impala returns to the bunker with one less person on board than when it left.

 

Everything Dean has worked so hard for comes crashing down in August. Maybe it’s the heat that pushes him over the edge, or his brother’s nagging at him to spend more time with Olivia, but either way he ends up snapping and does something reckless.  
He tells Sam that his boss Rob is paying him extra to go down to Texas and pick up a ’69 Mustang they’re going to restore. Sam rolls his eyes, and tells him to be back in time to take Olivia back-to-school shopping. The next day, Dean is back in the Impala, racing to Sugarland, Texas, where he’s caught lead of a nest of vamps. It feels good to be back in the Impala. He feels strong, capable, and the Mark on his arm seems to glow brighter at the prospect of killing.  
Hunting is like riding a bike. He questions the coroner and witnesses with the aura of a gruff FBI agent, and does his digging on the victims with skills that would’ve made Charlie proud. For the first time, he doesn’t mind doing the research, and does it with such relish that it would’ve scared him if the pull of the Mark wasn’t so strong.  
Three days later, he’s heading towards an abandoned farm around the time that Olivia would be getting home from school. The nest is supposed to be about fifteen vamps in all. And Dean Winchester is prepared to take it down alone. Armed with several syringes of dead man’s blood and a machete, Dean sneaks into the barn where they’re all living, and gets the jump on four of them before the rest wake up. Everything after that is a blur. It comes back to him almost instantly, and he finds himself hacking at the vampires with a ferocity that he didn’t know he even possessed anymore, and by the time he’s done, he’s covered in blood from head to toe, practically dripping in the stuff. There’s no way it’ll ever come out of the clothes, which means that he’s most likely going to have to toss them and pick up more on the way out of town to keep up appearances for Sam.  
Sam. What would he think of his big brother going behind his back and hunting again? He wants to feel bad – hell, he knows that he should feel bad. But he can feel the adrenaline pumping through his veins, clearing out a nest of vamps giving him a high that he didn’t know he was craving. It was like scratch an itch that you knew you shouldn’t. Dean wipes the edge of the machete off on the bottom of his now ruined jacket, and takes it off to throw in the trunk of the Impala. The Mark sits prominently against the skin of his forearm, staring back at him like a goddamn reminder of all his fuck ups. Except this time it’s not glowing, and the beast inside of him is quiet for the first time in months, and it feels better than he could have ever imagine. The Mark is sated for now.

 

He does exactly as planned, tosses the clothes in a trashcan on some back road on the way back to Lebanon. At the next stop he buys himself another set of clothes – a plaid flannel, another pair of jeans, a military jacket. His boots were salvageable, thank God. Replacing those would have been too obvious to an already suspicious Sam. The weapons in the trunk are cleaned until it’s impossible to tell they were even taken out in the first place, and Dean is able to drive back to Kansas in just under 9 hours, after being away from home for five days. Sam glowers at him when he walks in, eyes still skeptical. He shrugs and says that the asshole decided not to sell, and how the trip was a complete waste of time. All he says is that Olivia needs to go school shopping tomorrow, and hands him a list.  
The next day, Dean wakes up earlier than usual, having more energy than he has for months. After making Olivia breakfast, he drives her into the next town over, hitting a Target to buy all the things on the list. There’s the usual stuff: pencils, red pens, markers, colored pencils, spiral notebook, some folders. Then there’s stuff like glue sticks, hand sanitizer, and Kleenex that the teacher wants the kids to bring in. Dean rolls his eyes, but drops it all into the cart anyway. Olivia spends a good fifteen minutes debating over the backpack section before she settles on a blue and white polka-dotted one.   
“Purple is too girly.” Her father nods like he understands, even though he’s wondering what the hell happened. Last time he checked, she was just moving on from pink to purple. After they’re done there, they move onto the lunchbox section, and she finds one that’s tie-dyed into a rainbow of colors. Dean follows the handwritten note by Sam on the bottom of the paper telling him to buy all the things for school lunches and heads over to the actual grocery part of Target.  
It’s there that he realizes that he doesn’t know what she likes in her lunches. When Olivia was in the first grade she liked peanut butter sandwiches, and then later switched to peanut butter and jelly with the crust cut off.   
“So what’s the menu like this year, sweetheart?” He recovers himself, pushing the cart with one hand.   
“Turkey and cheese. And Sammy says that I have to have carrot sticks and fruit if I want candy.” Dean follows the directions with fumbling fingers, and after the cart is filled with all the stuff for her lunches, they check out and walk back out the Impala. Dean offers to help her pack up her backpack when they get home, but Olivia shakes her head, braids swinging back and forth, and tells him that she can do it all by herself.


	5. Chapter 5

Olivia starts fourth grade the following week. Dean goes back to work at the garage, and Sam switches jobs and starts work at the only law firm in town (it involved a lot of forgery, and fabrication of documents and certificates and recommendations, but by some miracle it works). Cas walks her to school, and then walks to his job at the library. Things are better, he guesses. Dean is more involved in Olivia’s life, and any worries he had are shelved for the time being.  
Like every first day of school since kindergarten, they take her picture in front of the bunker, and take turns posing with her. There are pictures for every occasion – first days of school, holidays, birthdays, dinners. If there was one thing they all agreed on, it was that there would be no shortage of documenting Olivia’s childhood.

 

Cas still remembers her very first day of school. Comparatively speaking, it was probably one of the most painful emotional experiences he’d ever had. It was seeing that baby grow until she could walk and talk and spell her own name. And then her being gone. The house was quieter than it should have been that day. It felt empty.  
He’d helped her pick out her outfit for the first day of school. And then, before they all drove her to the preschool, Dean, having shelled out for a digital camera, took pictures. Olivia. Olivia and Dean. Sam and Olivia. Cas and Olivia. And then all four of them together. Even though Dean doesn’t really care to admit it, Cas knew that he was sad once they dropped her off. She was the only child that Dean would ever have, and the only one that he would ever get the chance to raise. And every single one of her firsts was all of their lasts.

 

If there was a way for things to get worse for them, they did. Dean spends even less time at home, making up excuses to go away for several days at a time. Sam knows that he’s hunting, but is unwilling to admit it to himself. So he buries himself into work, and raising his niece in the absence of his brother. He makes dinner almost every night, and afterwards helps her with her homework (he never knew that long division and fractions could be such a bitch to teach but somehow he manages). Olivia is a fast learner, but she prefers to have Sam with her with her when she does her homework. Sometimes when Olivia doesn’t need help the two of them just sit there, and she’ll work on whatever homework she has that night, and Sam will work on paperwork from the law firm. Cas does a lot of work too. He’s in charge of making breakfast, and taking her to and from ballet classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays for an hour. He works at the library full time now, but is home every night for dinner, and walks Olivia to school every morning.  
Dean on the other hand is another story. When he’s home for dinner, which is becoming increasingly rare, it’s a silent affair on his part. Conversations usually consist of whatever she’s doing at school, and it’s now a domain that Dean has no real part of. He doesn’t know what they’re learning, and every time he asks he feels more and more like the worst father in existence. John knew he was a shitty father and just didn’t bother at least. Dean just knows he’s a shitty father, and wants to try, but doesn’t anyway. He doesn’t know which one is worse. The mark gets stronger, and Crowley begins to accompany him on the escapade hunts. Together, the King of Hell and the Once Righteous Man slaughter the supernatural at night, and Dean finds himself keeping several sets of clothes in the Impala because of the amount of bloodshed.  
It’s the same week of Olivia’s Christmas pageant. The hunt took longer than he anticipated – what was supposed to be one ruguru turned into being three - and now Dean finds himself an hour away from Olivia’s school at the time it’s supposed to be starting. He was supposed to be home yesterday morning. The pageant is all Olivia has been talking about, because this year she gets to be the angel, a fact that amused all members of the Winchester family endlessly. Their closest neighbor, an elderly woman by the name of Emily, offered to make Olivia’s costume, seeing as the three of them could stitch shut wounds, but didn’t have the first clue how to sew a costume. Cas refused, and took the project of making his niece the best angel costume (ever) on with as much enthusiasm and determination as one could expect to find coming from an actual angel. The look on his daughter’s face when Cas showed her the costume he’d made (sans angel blade, even though Cas had insisted and Sam and Dean had refused), made Dean all the more determined to get home on time, and he presses the accelerator of the Impala down to the floor.  
Even going 90 through a 70, Dean makes it to the school just as the pageant is ending. Her fourth and fifth grade classmates spill out of the school auditorium with their families, grandparents and parents congratulating their kids with plastered smiles and kisses. He searches the crowd for his own family frantically, the apologies and excuses he’d planned piled up in his throat so thick that they all blur together. They all go away as soon as he sees his daughter. Walking down the steps of the school, he wonders how it’s possible that every time he looks at his daughter she keeps getting more beautiful. She’s in the homemade white angel costume, glittery silver halo resting on the top of her blonde head. There’s glitter dabbed on her cheeks, probably the mothers in charge of costume’s doing. And good God does she look beautiful.  
You would’ve of had to have been blind to miss the smile on her face. It’s mirrored on Sam and Cas’s face, even though it doesn’t look quite right. In one arm, she’s clutching a bouquet of flowers that Dean doesn’t know the name of. Probably Sam’s doing. The two of them are dressed in suits, and it strikes Dean that the clothes he’s wearing are a dead giveaway to the fact that he missed the damn pageant. He swears under his breath, and kicks the ground.  
Olivia looks up, and the smile falls right off her face upon seeing her dad. She can tell from a single glance that he missed the performance, missed her bringing the news of the birth of Christ. Neither her father or her uncle really believe too much in that stuff, but it’s hard not to when her other uncle is an angel. Cas notices the sudden change in mood, and takes her hand in his to distract her.  
“You made a beautiful angel, Olivia. Heaven itself couldn’t have done a better job.” Even though she can feel tears collecting at the corners of her eyes, she smiles up at him and stops. Cas kneels down to her level and looks her in the eyes. By now the eye contact thing doesn’t bother her. She’s used to her uncle staring at people for long periods of time.  
“Really?”  
“Really.” He replies, and picks her up like she’s small again. Sammy gives her a halfhearted smile, and she can tell that there’s something bothering her uncle. Never once has she seen this look on his face. And it’s directed towards her dad. Unlike her uncle, Olivia isn’t mad, she’s just sad. He missed the Christmas Pageant, which she’s been rehearsing for all month. She wants to make her dad happy, to tell him that she’ll do whatever he wants for him to start coming to school. But she doesn’t.  
“We’ll talk about this at home.” Her uncle hisses into Dean’s ear. He swallows heavily but nods, going back to the Impala. The three of them ride home in silence, in Sam’s car. It’s miserable, and all she feels like doing is crying. At one point Sam and Cas look back at her sitting in the backseat, and she stares out of the windows as the dams break.

 

After Dean puts her to bed, and apologizes repeatedly, they talk in the dungeon. Talking would be the polite way to phrase what they do, but in reality, they scream at each other. Tempers keep raising and raising until finally Sam snaps, and lunges at his brother, punching all the available skin. As much as it hurts him, he hopes it hurts Dean worse. He hopes that Dean feels worse than he ever has in his whole goddamn life for letting his daughter down like that. For not being there for her. Sam keeps punching and punching, and Dean just lets him until Cas pulls him off.  
“Stop Sam. This isn’t going to change things.” Sam turns on Cas, not a single scratch on him. His face is flushed with anger, knuckles bloodied and scratched. It’s a look that he hasn’t worn in years, not since they stopped hunting.  
“How the hell can you say that? He missed his own damn daughter’s Christmas play because he was off doing who the fuck knows what. How can you take his side?”  
“I’m not taking a side Sam. Dean’s suffered enough.” Cas says this in a voice that leaves no room for argument. At least that’d what he hopes it sounds like. Dean is lying on the ground half unconscious by now, face nearly unrecognizable. He deserves all of it. Cas knows it. Sam knows. Dean knows.   
“Screw you man.” Sam says one last time, kicking Dean in his side with defeat. There’s no point in trying to beat him up anymore. Either Dean is going to feel regret on his own or he’s not going to feel it at all. There was no in between. Cas walks over, staring down at Dean.   
Dean, who was once the Righteous Man. Dean who broke the first of the Sixty Six Seals, but stopped the apocalypse. Dean who went to hell. Dean who went to Purgatory. Dean who became a demon. Dean who has the most beautiful daughter in the world. Dean who makes pancakes on Sundays and watches cartoons. Dean who wants to be a good father but doesn’t know how to be. All the different, never endings versions of Sam’s Dean, and his Dean, and Olivia’s Dean, all blended together. It strikes him that he doesn’t know who the man in front of him is anymore. He’s all of those things, but that’s not what makes Dean, well, Dean.   
There’s a small glow coming from Dean’s arm, making the way his sleeve fits look awkward. It’s not something that anyone would notice unless they looked hard enough for long enough, but in the dim light of the interrogation room, it’s almost unmistakable. Cas pulls up his sleeve, and inch by inch, the tanned skin of his forearm is revealed. He sucks in a rattling breath, and backs away from Dean like he has some kind of disease.

Dean with the Mark of Cain.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the longer wait. So here's two chapters! I appreciate all the kudos and support so much!

Cas tells Sam, and they confront Dean the next day. He checks the Impala, and sure enough, there’s the stash of weapons in the trunk, plain as day. When Sam confronts Dean, and it’s sharp teeth and sharper words, each syllable grating down his spine. He tells him to stop hunting. If he won’t do it for Sam or Cas, at least do it for Olivia. She needs a father.  
It hurts more than he could’ve imagined. He’s a pathetic excuse for a father. Every second he spends away from his daughter is a second of her life that he will never experience, a second that has flown away from him. And he’s missed so many already.  
“I’ll try harder.” He promises, voice hoarse. Bruises mark every part of his face, evidence from Sam’s anger last night. He deserved all that and more.   
“Well that’s not fucking good enough, Dean. Do it, and then maybe it might be. Actually spend some time with your own goddamn daughter for a change instead of going off and hunting.” Dean hangs his head. There’s nothing else to be said. Either he tries harder or – no. He doesn’t want to think about the other alternatives.

 

In Hell, Dean lasted thirty years before giving in. At home, he only lasts thirty weeks.  
Sam and Cas believe his improvement. He starts bonding with Olivia again, picking her up from school every day instead of Cas. He finds out what she’s learning in class and how to help her with it, and sits with her after school to do it so they can all watch movies after dinner. It’s as close to normal as they can ever hope to get as a family. The improvement is clear – Olivia is all smiles, laughing more and more. For her, this is what she’s always wanted. This is the best version of her father. The one that makes pancakes on Sundays again, and the one who puts her report card up on the refrigerator. She may only be in fifth grade, but she feels light years older than her classmates. They don’t know about her family. They don’t know who the Winchesters are, and all the times they have saved the world.  
But Dean’s not stupid. He’s not dumb enough to deny the fact that there’s no taking away the mark. It’s who he is now. He does the summoning ritual one night after everyone is asleep. Crowley appears in an instant, smirk sitting on his lips. He knows. Maybe he’s been anticipating this for a long time now. Or maybe he’s just a bastard that knows a train wreck when he sees it.  
“So they tried to break you, didn’t they Squirrel?”  
“What do I do?”  
“What you do best. Keep pretending. I’ll come when the time is right.” And then Crowley snaps his fingers and disappears. And Dean goes back up to bed, and the next morning pretends like he didn’t spend all night awake and staring at the ceiling.

 

“Merry Christmas, Dad!” Olivia bolts down the stairs on Christmas morning, running straight into her father’s waiting arms. Her smile is wider than he’s seen in a long time, and her eyes are shining brighter than the lights they’d strung up on the tree they’d gotten from the lot down the street last week. Dean chuckles and kisses the top of her head even though it makes him feel like he’s breaking inside. John would’ve been proud.  
“Merry Christmas, kiddo.” He replies. Christmas had never been his favorite time of the year, even growing up. Christmas is for family, and he didn’t have one of those. He had Sammy, and John, who wasn’t even there half the time. Now that he finally had the family he’d wanted all these years; the apple pie life with crayon colored pictures hanging on the refrigerator, and report cards that made him proud; he just didn’t know what to do. So he pretends, for Olivia’s sake he reminds himself. Pretends for nine years going now.  
“Let’s see what Santa brought.” He lightly pushes his daughter towards the presents under the Christmas tree, and she turns around with that expression on her face that reminds Dean so much of Elizabeth. It’s that you-really-think-I’m-that-stupid look that makes his face flush red.  
“Dad, I know that Santa isn’t real. Uncle Cas told me so like three years ago.” Dean shoots a dark look over to Cas, who holds up his hands in a mock surrender. He’s told her when she was six, because there was honestly no sense in lying to Olivia. The three of them put the presents under the tree every year, simple as that.  
“Well,” He clears his throat, “let’s open some presents.” Olivia of course picks up the biggest package with her name on it (from Sammy), and grins at her uncle before tearing at the carefully wrapped present. Her eyes go wide as soon as she sees what’s inside.  
“You got me a easel!” She shrieks, ripping open the packaging until the brushes tumble out for further inspection.  
“Figured you’d like that for painting from now on.” Sam smiles right back at his niece, pride clearly written into the lines of his face.   
“Alright Sammy, time for yours.” Dean tosses one of the presents towards Sam, and out of pure reflex, he catches it. The process repeats with Cas, and then with Dean (who get a watch, a new bookshelf, and one of those fancy car washing kits, respectively). Olivia gets more books from Cas, and then more art supplies from Dean. By the time they’re done opening presents, Olivia is filling up a cup with water for her brushes, and settling in for painting. Dean walks over and hands her the brushes.  
“I’ll get breakfast started kiddo.” She grins, because this is exactly what she wanted for Christmas. The paints didn’t really matter, even though she’d been wanting them for a while now. She just wanted her dad to be back to normal. And for once he was.

 

Olivia’s tenth birthday rolls around quicker than it should. After some pushing, Dean agrees to let her have a party, and Sam is quick to call over to some girly tea place in town and book it for the seventeenth. It’s a production, all in all. Cas decorates the party room they booked, and Dean went and ordered a cake from the bakery in town with white icing and frosting roses on the top. Olivia invites ten of the girls in her grade, and they all show up at once, frilly dresses and presents in tow. Their mothers walk in behind them, instantly finding Dean, Sam, and Cas, and begin to cooing over how sweet they are, and what a good father Dean is.   
Dean hopes that the torture will be over soon.  
Sure enough, they light the candles on the cake soon, and Cas snaps away with the camera at the Olivia. Sam cuts everyone a piece of cake, and makes sure that his niece gets the corner piece with the most icing on it.  
Dean still is itching to leave, hands curled into white knuckled fists as he grits out a smile when he’s handed a piece of cake. Even though he thinks the icing is too sweet, he shovels the cake into his mouth mechanically, and gives a somewhat attentive reaction while Olivia opens her presents and enjoys a second slice of cake. His mind is screaming at him to leave, and he can feel the mark burning into his arm, and he feels the power surging through him like a fucking hurricane, and it leaves him breathless. The Mark makes him crave the kind of bloodshed that only comes from the times when he and Crowley hunted together, and for a moment he’s almost certain that he’s going to snap.  
“I love you, Daddy.” Olivia wraps her arms around Dean’s middle, and he stiffens. Screw it all, but he’d fucking die before he hurts a single fucking hair on his daughter’s head.   
“Love you too, Liv.” He mutters, returning the hug. It’s like he’s drowning and Olivia is the only thing anchoring him to shore.  
She smiles at him before leaving to play with her friends.

 

He tucks Olivia into bed later on that night, gazing down at his daughter. She’s already asleep as he pulls back the covers and sets her down into her bed. It hits him just like it always does; with the force of a hurricane. His daughter is breathtakingly beautiful. And that’s saying something. Dean’s seen a lot of beautiful things in his life – he’s seen the Grand Canyon (twice) and his brother’s smile when they’re driving to their next hunt in the Impala and his mother’s love. And none of it really compares to the beauty before him.  
By now she looks more like Dean, even though he can see traces of Elizabeth in her already. All moon pale skin and sun-kissed freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her eyes are the same as his; sometimes hazel, sometimes green. Her hair reminds him of Mary. It’s the color of sunshine and curls down her back like something out of a fairytale. Biased be damned, but Olivia is the most beautiful fucking thing on this planet.  
Dean kneels down beside her bed, gently smoothing the hair away from her face. Every atom of him is hurting, is aching because he knows that he’s not a good enough father, and that one day soon he’s just going to fucking snap, and he’s not prepared to leave Olivia around to pick up whatever pieces are left after that. His daughter is never going to wash away the blood that he leaves behind.  
“Goodnight, baby.” He whispers, and presses a kiss to her forehead, willing every ounce of his love to somehow transfer into his daughter, but he knows it’s not enough. It’ll never fucking be enough.  
Olivia stretches and yawns, opening her bleary eyes and blinking several times.  
“Goodnight Daddy.” She murmurs, and then snuggles deeper into the blankets. He stays sitting there next to her bed until the sky goes from black to purple.  
“I love you. No matter what.” Planting another kiss on her forehead, he quietly walks out, shutting the door behind him.

 

Dean is down in the basement before he can think properly. The Mark is pulling him there, and he’s not even a little bit surprised to see Crowley waiting for him. Something drops in him, because there’s only one fucking reason why he could be here and he’s not sure if-  
“It’s time Dean.”  
Dean listens.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait! I was out of the country for several weeks visiting my family. I'm going to upload the few chapters I did finish though, and if you still want to finish this story thank you so so much!

Dean Winchester leaves his family on February eighteenth. It’s a Sunday. There is no breakfast that morning.   
No one accepts it at first. The Dean they know would’ve left a note, would’ve called, would’ve done something to let them know where he was going, but there’s nothing.  
Sam calls. Dean doesn’t answer.

“Alright, man this isn’t funny. Olivia is freaking out, Dean. Where are you? Just call me back when you get this.”

“Dean, answer your fucking phone. I swear to God I will never forgive you if you leave her.”

“You fucking bastard. Fuck you.”

Sometimes Sam calls drunk. Dean still doesn’t answer.

“How could you? She needs her father and you fucking left us!”

“She loves you and you couldn’t care less! Don’t fucking come near us!”

One month passes, and Cas is still reassuring Olivia that Dean’s just on a business trip. Three more pass and he’s stopped mentioning Dean altogether. It’s clear that he’s not coming back. Olivia is beside herself. They can all hear the sobs that rack through her small body at night, and it hurts more than anything they’ve ever experienced.

 

Olivia stops crying after five months. She stops talking after eight. 

 

Olivia speaks for the second time when she’s twelve.   
It hits her like a freight train, and it feels like she’s going to explode unless she says something, and she bursts into her Uncle’s room in the middle of the night and crawls into bed with Sam, burying her face into his chest.  
“Olivia? What’s going on?” Sam questions, sleep making his voice thick. She doesn’t answer. She just starts crying. And she hates herself for it. This is the first time she’s cried about her father in over a year and it’s every bit as terrible as she imagined. She sobs until she’s sure that her lungs are going to give out from lack of oxygen, and then she sobs some more. Sam hugs her tighter, because it’s the only thing he knows how to do for his niece. In this moment, he honestly hopes that Dean is dead. Because if he ever comes back, Sam is going to kill him, himself.  
Too much time passes, and he’s almost sure that Olivia is asleep before she speaks. Her voice is scratchy and raw from not having been used in over two years, and it doesn’t even sound a fraction of how it used to. The words are muffled into his shirt, but they ring out in the silence the same as if she had screamed them.  
“I hate him.” The words shoot straight down to Sam’s soul, bitterness rattling around in his bones. Olivia says nothing after that and turns over.  
The next morning, he thinks she’s back to not talking, but he’s just as surprised as Cas is when she tells them that she loves them before she leaves for the bus to go to school. Cas’s face breaks into a smile for the first time in what seems like two years. Dean leaving had taken its toll on Cas too. Dean was his companion, his best friend. He raised Dean from Hell, and he still just left them without so much as a warning. None of them wanted to really acknowledge how much things had changed after the gaping hole that dean had left them with. Olivia stopped talking. To make up for the lost income, Sam and Cas worked from eight to six every day, and Olivia walked to and from school by herself when she didn’t take the bus. They stopped talking to each other. Cas knocked on Olivia’s door three times throughout the day – to wake her up for school, to tell her when dinner was ready, and to tell her to go to bed. He couldn’t really remember the last time he’d talked to his niece.  
“I love you too.” He mumbles after her, still in shock. His reply falls on deaf ears, but he hopes that she heard him.

 

Sometimes Olivia will sleep with Sam. Sometimes with Cas. Usually it’s whenever she has nightmares or just misses Dean, but doesn’t want to admit it to herself. She walks to one of her uncles’ rooms in the middle of the night, and crawls into bed with them like she’s six and not twelve, and none of them mention it in the morning. It’s barely been two years, and Sam still thinks about his brother everyday. He tried looking for Dean of course. He tortured demon after demon trying to find out either his or Crowley’s whereabouts, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t find anything. Most of them just plain didn’t know. They were as clueless as to where Dean and Crowley were as he was.   
There wasn’t a single doubt in his mind that together, the two of them were doing something. He’d seen the effect that the Mark had had on Dean, and Crowley was the only person on this God forsaken Earth that would want to fuck around with that kind of power. Between taking care of his family, and managing work and grief, he spent every other second researching. Summoning spells, location spells, anything that so much as mentioned the Mark of Cain he’d looked at by this point. But his brother wasn’t going to be found. Especially if Dean didn’t want to be found.  
Sure, his job kept him busy enough. He’d gotten another advancement at the law firm, and was now assisting one of the partners at the firm in court. The steady flow of paper work kept him up late most nights, and the nightmares kept him up later.  
“I need you to sign this for school.” Olivia’s voice barely comes above a whisper as she places a paper in front of him. Sam barely glances it over before turning to her and pulling out a chair at the table.  
“What’s this for, kiddo?”  
“Field trip. We’re going to go to the courthouse on Friday.” Scrawling his signature on the designated line, Sam quickly hands it back to her, but not before he takes a long look at the girl standing before him. Every time he looks at her, she reminds him so painfully much of his brother. The same eyes, the same freckles, the same hair. Green eyes flicker up to meet his, and he gives her a wry smile. Olivia doesn’t smile back, she hasn’t in so long, but she gives him a nod, which is a lot more than usual, so he counts this one as a victory. He doesn’t miss the way her eyes look duller than usual and her hair isn’t really the color of sunshine anymore, it just looks like straw. It pains him more than anything else to see her like this, but he doesn’t know what to say.  
It would have been a lot easier if Dean were the same type of father that John was. But that’s just not the way that things work. The fact of the matter was; Dean was an amazing father. He was protective and patient and doting and kind and every inch the father that Olivia deserved. And he still left them by choice.  
“Do you need me to pack your lunch on Friday?” He calls up the stairs.  
“Cas will do it.” She mumbles back. Sam turns back to his work.

 

On one hand, Sam really wishes that he could say that the field trip went well. But that’d be a lie.  
On a last minute change of plans, Sam called the school and signed Cas up to be one of the chaperones to the courthouse, submitting a falsified background check (Cas wasn’t actually supposed to exist) with a note written on the law firm’s stationary. The next day, Cas was sitting on the bus on the way to the courthouse, keeping an eye on Olivia from pure force of habit.  
Everything was going smoothly at the court. The kids were there to watch some kind of mock trial to learn about the judicial system, and Sam was selected to play lawyer. Once the trial was finished, the group broke up for lunch, and all the employees followed the teachers and students outside. Cas sat far away from Olivia with the other chaperones, even though she, albeit grudgingly, got up to give both him and Sam a hug and a kiss. Sam listened halfheartedly to Judge Zimmerman talk about his weekend at his ranch, all the while watching his niece interact with her friends. And then hell broke loose.  
The yelling was what caught his attention first.  
“You’re just a stupid loser whose father left because he couldn’t stand to look at your face any longer!” Some brown haired girl with a nametag that read Caroline yelled at Olivia. Insults coming out of her mouth put aside, Sam already didn’t like the brat. She was bigger than the rest of the girls, and had pink braces on her nasty little smile. She reminded him a lot of Dirk.  
“Shut. Up.” Olivia snarled back, immediately standing up from the picnic table. Her fists were balled white-knuckled at her sides, and for a second he felt kind of bad for the mousy haired girl that wanted to fuck with his niece.   
“What are you going to do about it? Cry? Go on. Cry about Daddy!” Caroline’s were cut off abruptly with Olivia’s fist colliding with her nose. Blood gushed out almost instantly, and the crunch was loud enough that the hush that took over the courtyard area was almost comical.  
“You freak!” The words hit Sam to the core, and the shriek that came from her was loud enough that all the men at the table visibly flinched, and were on their feet in seconds when Olivia was tackled to the floor. Sam pushed his way through teachers and students and parents, finally making his way to the two girls. As much as he wished it wasn’t true, Olivia was getting her ass handed to her. The bigger girl had her firmly pinned down, and was rapidly striking any available space that Olivia left open, using her larger size to her advantage. Sam surged forward separating the two girls right as Olivia managed to send a firm kick to the other girl’s face.  
Luckily for the both of them, the teacher chose that moment to intervene, tugging Caroline to the side and speaking harshly to her loudly enough for Sam to easily hear. Sam did the same, and Cas immediately joined them, checking Olivia over and wishing that he still had his powers. Blood was still pouring out of Olivia’s nose steadily, and she was sporting an already nasty-looking shiner on her right eye and cheek. Her lip was busted up pretty good too.  
The teacher walks over, placing an arm on Sam’s shoulder.   
“We’ll take care of this tomorrow. I suggest you take your niece home, Mr. Winchester.” Sam nods, and gives Cas the keys to the car and tells him to take Olivia outside. Cas apologizes to the teachers profusely, and walks Olivia out of the double doors before any further incidents can happen. Sam is reeling, and he doesn’t know what to do. There are too many different things going on at once. His superiors are watching him like a hawk, and the other parents are looking at him like he’s raised a monster. He wants so badly to start yelling at them, to start telling them that he’s doing his damned best, and he misses his brother so much that it physically hurts to think of Dean’s laugh, but he doesn’t. He gives a wry and very much apologetic smile to his co-workers and shakes their hands, and then does the same with the Olivia’s teacher, and promises to come in first thing tomorrow morning for a conference with her and the principal of the middle school.  
The door of the Impala shuts firmly behind Sam, and the three of them sit in silence for too many long moments.  
“I’m not going to yell. But if you think we’re not going to talk about this, you’ve got another thing coming.” Sam says all this while looking at his niece in the rearview mirror. She’s stubbornly looking anywhere but him, and stares out of the window as the rest of the town faders behind them.  
Cas turns the radio on to drown out the silence.  
Sam just presses the accelerator down to the floor.

 

“Explain. Now.” Cas is the one to ask the questions. His face is stern, and as her uncle stares at her, she knows that unlike with Sam, there’s no way she’s going to beat Cas in a staring contest. She huffs, and crosses her arms across her still flat chest. The other girls mock her for it in gym class, or worse, they just laugh at her while they all stand around in bras that they can’t even fill out. Caroline is usually with them. A year older than all the kids in their grade, Caroline Finney was every inch the stereotype of a bully. She was stupid, and stuck out like a sore thumb, and made everyone miserable just because she knew she could. And like all bullies, she’d picked one kid out of all the rest and made it her mission in life to make them as miserable as possible.  
Sure she’d always known she was different. It was easier to ignore when she was in first and second grade and could hide behind classes where everyone was friends, and was required to be invited to all the other girls’ birthday parties, but by the time she’d gotten to third grade, the other kids had started to take notice and mock her for it. It was the stupid stuff at first – her clothes, the way that Cas braided her hair, the freckles that seemed to cover her entire face – and then it got personal. The first fight Olivia got into was in the third grade. She had no idea what she was doing, and her only saving grace was the fact that Jacob Dunn didn’t want to get in trouble for hitting a girl.  
Caroline Finney didn’t give a fuck about who she hit as long as she drew blood.   
Technically speaking, Olivia isn’t allowed to say the word “fuck”. She also isn’t allowed to say ”shit”, “damn”, “bitch”, or “ass” either, but that doesn’t mean that she couldn’t think it. It’s not like she hasn’t heard Sam drunkenly cursing at her father on the phone before anyway. She’s heard it enough times to know more curse words than girls her age should. But that’s beside the point.  
“Olivia.” Her uncle prompts, and he stares at her some more. There’s no way that she can win in the staring contest against him, but that doesn’t mean that she’s going to crack under the pressure either. She’s a Winchester for God’s sake.  
“What?” She asks, never letting her green eyes leave his. Sam leaves the room, and she can hear the sound of him making a phone call on the landline.  
“Last chance. Explain yourself.”  
“If you think I’m sorry for it, I’m not. Caroline has had it out for me since last year.” The lines between Cas’s eyebrows grown deeper, and he shakes his head momentarily and then speaks softly.  
“I know that your father has been hard. It’s been difficult for all of us too. But you don’t need-“ She cuts him off before her uncle can even think about finishing whatever lecture he’s trying to give.  
“Don’t talk about him around me. Ever.”   
“You can’t keep doing this every time someone mentions him. Eventually you’re going to have to be able to hear people talk about him.”  
“Yeah well that day isn’t going to be today. Am I excused now?” Resigned, Cas nods and watches as his niece gets up to leave for her room.  
“Not so fast. Sit back down Liv.” Sam walks over, his arms crossed in front of him. Feet sounding loudly against the floor, Olivia stomps back over and sits back on the couch with as much noise as she can. Sam rolls his eyes but takes a seat next to her anyway.  
“I don’t like that you fought with her. And this isn’t the end of it, but,” he pauses for a moment and then shoots her a wry smile before continuing, “you kind of got your ass handed to you. So once you’re better, the two of us are teaching you how to fight.”  
“Really?” Her ears immediately perk up at this, mostly because she’s always wanted to learn and the answer Dean gave her has always been no. But Dean’s not here, and she doesn’t really care about what her father wants anymore.  
“Yeah, kiddo. Now go wash the blood off.”


	8. Chapter 8

“Harder.” Sam commands, holding up his forearms to block his face. He’s barely broken a sweat, but Olivia looks like she’s run a marathon. Her blonde hair sticks to her face in clumps, and sweat drips down her face in salty trails. Not that she would admit it, but she’s beyond tired. But that doesn’t mean she’s going to stop.  
In determination, she curls her fists together again, taking on the protective stance that Sam taught her. Crouched, legs shoulder width apart for balance, forearms high enough to block her face, but not high enough to leave her upper body open.  
“Any day now.” Without thinking, she jabs quickly, and Sam deflects it just as fast. The result leaves her off balance, and she stumbles back to regain her footing. It’s the same thing that’s been happening all morning. Sam will give her directions, and she’ll follow, and then get blocked. And then he’ll give more directions. The skin across the tops of her knuckles is red and raw and stings, and she’s fairly certain that she’s sweating more than she did two summers ago when the air conditioning went out for a few days in the July heat.  
“You’re not thinking. You need to think about your next move, and know it before you’re going to do it. Again.” Olivia wants so badly to tell Sam that she is thinking, that he’s just better, but she grits her teeth. She’ll show him.   
Analyzing Sam’s stance, she notices how he puts most of his weight on his right side, despite what he’s been telling her about even weigh distribution, blah, blah, blah. In one smooth move, she steps quickly to the left, and uses her much shorter height to jab Sam in the ribs. Hard. Sam coughs loudly and then backs off, waving a hand.  
“Not bad, kiddo. Let’s call it for today.” Pride fills up every pore in Olivia’s body for the first time in three weeks. Not once has she been able to get the jump on either Sam or Cas, and even though today’s sparring was especially grueling, it makes her feel lighter than ever before. She walks back inside with a spring in her step, missing the equally proud smile that slowly begins to take over Sam’s face.

 

Sam drills Olivia every Saturday in hand-to-hand combat and shooting. Sometimes he’ll switch things up and teach her random things he’s learned from John and Dean, like how to pick a motel that flies under the radar (edge of town, independently owned), and which room to choose (corner room, bottom floor if possible). Other times he’ll teach her how to pick locks, and how to ask questions without arising too many of her own. The only thing he holds off on is teaching her how to make ID’s, because he knows where that kind of knowledge will get her in another four years, and he’ll be damned if he ends up seeing his niece barhopping before she’d out of high school.  
He has his doubts about it. Mostly he just worries that he’s going to end up like John was, more drill sergeant than father, and other days he worries that he’s not pushing her hard enough. Whether he likes it or not, Olivia is getting older, and with both him and Cas spending less time at home, he needs to know that his niece can protect herself. Even if it’s just until him or Cas can get there.  
On Sundays, Cas teaches her lore and tells Sam that he’s helping her with her reading. Lying doesn’t really suit him, but he’s willing to do it. It’s only fair really. Sam is teaching Olivia how to fight after Dean’s explicit instructions not to, so it’s only right that Cas teach her how to protect herself from everything else.  
So that’s what they do. On Saturdays, Olivia is woken up by Sam at six in morning and they practice until noon and their arms have long since turned to lead. On Sundays, Cas holes up with her in the library and teaches her sigils and spells and the importance of salt and holy water. On more than one occasion, Olivia’s eyes blow wide, and she keeps a notebook filled with cramped twelve-year-old handwriting on all the different lessons that Cas teaches her. She listens with wide eyes and wanting ears, because this world was always the untouchable. Sure she’d known that it had existed. But it was so far removed from everything her family was that it didn’t even seem possible to try to get her father to teach her anything.  
It doesn’t fix anything. But at least they’re talking again.

 

Olivia turns thirteen on February 17th. It’s her third birthday without her father.   
After a significant amount of persuading on both Cas and Sam’s behalf, they manage to convince her to have a birthday party at some place the next town over that has indoor trampolines or something like that. She only invites ten people, and only five show up.  
In part, Olivia knows that it’s because of her family. By now, the entire town practically knows her sob story. How her father skipped town, and her uncles now take care of her. How they’re secluded enough from the rest of the town that it makes her the weird girl in class, and she only really talks to two girls in her class. Mostly because they feel sorry for her, she guesses. She’d have to be blind to miss the way that her teachers and the other mothers look at her with pity in their eyes.  
She doesn’t have the heart to tell her uncles that she hates that school. She hates this town. She hates the mothers that whisper “that poor girl” when they think she can’t hear, and she hates the kids in her class that snicker when she walks in. But for their benefit, she’ll smile, and act like the five kids that attended her birthday party actually care about her, and she’ll act like she loves school and every single damn person in it. Maybe then she’ll start to believe it too.

 

A week before school ends, Olivia hacks into the school’s computer and changes her grades from D’s to B’s. It wasn’t like it was exactly difficult, Lebanon Middle School was the only middle school in a town of about 7,000 people, and the school hardly cared about teaching, let alone making sure no one changed their grades. The following week, Olivia takes home her report card, and her uncle’s congratulate her, even though Sam tells her that he knows she could be doing better. Which is true. She could be doing better if she wanted to.  
“So, I was thinking about maybe the three of us taking a trip this summer.” Sam mentions it in the middle of dinner. No one answers, so he continues.  
“I hear that Florida is nice. We could finally take you to Disneyworld.” She can’t help but roll her eyes at this. She’s thirteen with an absentee father and a family that used to hunt things that would make the pope cry. The last thing she wanted or needed in her life, ever, was Sam and Cas pretending that they can try to make up for her lack of a normal childhood.  
“You know, you don’t have to try so hard.” Sam has the decency to look embarrassed at Olivia’s statement. Cas pretends that he doesn’t hear anything and continues eating. She has to physically resist the urge to roll her eyes at that. Pretending to not hear anything was what Cas did now. Sam tries too hard to care, and Cas tries too hard not to. What a great family.  
“Yeah, he left us. So what. You don’t have to try to act like everything is okay when it’s not.”  
“I’m not trying to act like everything is okay. I’m just trying to let us be a family-“  
“Oh that’s rich,” Olivia snorts, and pushes her chair back from the table with a screech that fills up the entire room.   
“We’re never going to be a normal family! My father and uncle hunt everything that goes bump in the night. My other uncle is an ex-angel. We live in a bunker built to let us hide from anything vaguely supernatural. And you want to take me to freaking Disneyworld? You’re crazy!” The words explode out of her mouth, each increasing in volume until finally she’s screaming at her uncles. When they don’t say anything, she stands up, and throws a filthy look at Cas.   
“Goodnight.” All they hear is the sound of her feet stomping up the stairs to her room. Cas flinches when he hears the door slam. Sam just lets his face fall into his hands.

 

School is over for a grand total of two weeks before reality comes crashing in. For the past two weeks, Olivia has done nothing other than sit in her room watching replays of movies she’s already seen more than several times. She rarely leaves to come down for dinner, and Sam is fairly certain that he’s witnessed her getting up to leave her room only once, other than for her to train on the weekends. And he’s sick of it.  
When he jerks open the door to her room, Olivia is predictably laying down on her bed, the only movement in the room coming from The Mummy Returns playing on the TV. She doesn’t look up at his entry. So without pausing, Sam snatches the remote off of her nightstand, and clicks it off.  
“Hey! I was watching that!” The outrage on her face would have been comical if Sam wasn’t so frustrated with her lack of participation in, well, anything.   
“Too bad. You’ve been watching TV for the past two weeks. You’ve been down to eat dinner five times. Get up.”  
“No.” She crosses her arms across her chest and gives him a look that’s clearly Dean. It’s that look that’s daring him to do something, and he’s seen it too many times from his brother, and now too many times from his niece. So for once, he’s going to do something other than giving her the bitch face and just asking again.  
“You don’t want to get up? Fine.” He tucks the remote into the pocket of his jeans, and then walks over to the back of the TV and unplugs the cable box and HDMI cords.  
“What are you doing?” Olivia jolts out of bed and tries to grab the cords out of his hands. The pajamas that he saw her wearing a few days ago are still on, and he can clearly see red marks from the sheets on her legs. Sam just holds them up higher and walks out of her room.  
“Cas and I are leaving in an hour. If I were you, I’d shower and pack and be downstairs then.” He leaves her standing in the middle of her room, fists clutched white knuckled at her sides.  
“Are you kidding me?” Olivia flops back down onto the bed and does the one thing she’s seen in movies. She grabs a pillow and screams into it, until she’s gasping for air. The last time she showered was either three or four days ago, and she’s probably watched about thirty movies over the course of the past two weeks she’s spent in bed. And she doesn’t have any interest in doing anything else. It’s not like she has any friends from school to hang out with, and she can only spend so much time with Sam and Cas before she gets sick of it. Now Sam physically took the fucking TV from her room, and told her to be downstairs. Fucking fine.  
In twenty minutes, Olivia is showered and dressed in a tank top and shorts, and throwing clothes into a duffel bag. A few books are thrown in for good measure. She climbs into the car with two minutes left to spare.  
“We’re heading to California. Visit the beaches.”  
“Awesome.” She plugs in her headphones and turns the music onto earsplittingly loud. Then she sleeps until they’re pulling into a gas station on the border of Colorado. Cas fills the tank up, while Sam runs inside and gets snacks. He tosses a bag of peanut M&M’s into her lap and takes her phone and shuts it in the glove box.  
“Anything else you want to take? My soul?” Sam gives her the bitch face in the rearview mirror and rolls his eyes at her. It’s a pointed jab at his time as soulless, but for her sake, he’s going to ignore it. She’s angry, and pissed off, and maybe he shouldn’t have just ordered her downstairs like that, but fuck it all if he was just going to let her rot in her room all summer long.  
“Not funny, Liv.”  
“Could’ve fooled me. Why couldn’t we just stay home?” Cas opens the door and sits in the front seat.  
“Because you haven’t left your room in nearly three weeks. We’re going on a trip as a family, and we’re going to have fun.”  
“Look who decided to speak up.” There’s cruelty in her words, and the lack of warmth in her eyes makes him angry with Dean. Dean took his sweet girl with him when he left, and now all that’s left is a bitter shell of a girl.  
“Olivia Samantha Winchester, I know you’re angry. Both of us are too. But stop. He’s not coming back. He left because he’s selfish.”  
It’s quiet for too long, and Sam shifts the car into drive and pulls out onto the road. They merge onto I-70 and settle in for the long haul, the low rumble of the Impala’s engine making plenty of noise for the three of them. The land around them is just barely starting to turn to mountains, and when she presses her hand up against the window, the cold doesn’t bother her.  
“How long are we going to be there for?”  
“As long as we want.”   
“Cool.” The smile isn’t anywhere near genuine, but it’s a start.


	9. Chapter 9

They arrive in San Diego a little after noon. The beaches are crowded, and Olivia gets back into the car, pulls out the map, and tells them that they should head on to Mexico. Sam pulls fake passports out of the glove compartment and shifts into drive.  
They flash their passports at the border checkpoint, get them stamped, and then drive on until the asphalt turns to dirt roads, and then to sand. When they find spot on the beach that only has one other family, the car’s wheels haven’t even stopped moving before Olivia hops out.  
“Come on!” Olivia urges them, throwing open the door and getting out. Within seconds, her shoes are off, and she’s sprinting towards the water, kicking up sand in her wake.   
“We should’ve taken her on a vacation sooner. I’ve read that it is customary.” Cas is watching her splash in the water with a bittersweet expression.   
“We’re here now.”  
“You guys are so lame! Come on!” Her uncles roll their pants up to their knees, and wade out into the water. It’s surprisingly cool, and with the Mexican sun beating down on their shoulders, it’s the perfect combination. In one smooth move, Olivia swipes a hand through the water, and catches both of them with water.  
“Don’t start something you can’t finish.” Cas warns her, and she just shoots him a wink and splashes them again. Cas responds by forcing her underwater as gently as possible, and then releasing her when he sees her laughing.  
“Oh, it is so on!” The two of them splash around in the water, and Sam pulls out a small digital camera and takes pictures. It reminds him of the times when Bobby used to take pictures like he was documenting their lives, and with each picture he takes, his smile grows wider.  
When they finally drag themselves to shore, there isn’t an inch of fabric that isn’t wet, and Sam mentally pats himself on the back for buying a waterproof digital camera. The sun has lowered considerably in the sky, and Sam drags towels out of the trunk and lays them on the seats.  
“Don’t you dare get those seats wet.” Rolling her eyes, Olivia flops down across the backseat and pushes sunglasses down over her eyes.  
“Whatever you say, Sasquatch.”

 

Sam pays a woman six thousand pesos to rent out a house a few miles from the beach. It’s fully furnished, and paid for by the month, and even though the towels are kind of scratchy and the radio doesn’t pick up any stations in English, the house is actually fairly nice. The grocery store is a ten minute walk from the house, and within a week, they’ve accepted drowning in sweat with the summer heat as a normal part of their day.  
For two months, they stay there. During the daytime, they’ll go down to the beach, and they’ll swim, or rent snorkels that have been in too many mouths before, or attempt to learn to surf. Cas picks snorkeling up with vigor, and they have to drag him out of the waves on more than one occasion. He’s fascinated by the fish that swim at the bottom of the reefs, and the clarity of the water. Sam, on the other hand, spends less time snorkeling, and more time running on the beach. Olivia wakes up early and joins him after the first few days, and even though they don’t really say much, it’s still the closest he’s felt to his niece since Dean left.   
Dean. It’s been just over three years. Three whole fucking, hellish years. A part of him hates his brother, just like his niece does. But even he knows that he’s lying to himself. Sam will never hate Dean, just like Olivia will never stop being his daughter, and the moon will never not be in the sky. The three of them are just starting to learn to grow around the gaping hole that he left.  
“¡Vamos, alto!” She screams at him from down the beach, tugging Cas along by the hand. The two of them are covered in sand from their knees, down, and there are nearly identical grins painted on their faces. The sight makes Sam’s heart warm, Dean be damned. This is his fucking family, and he’s going to do whatever it takes for them to be whole again. 

 

Olivia’s laugh is infectious as Cas spins her around.  
“Cas, no one dances anymore!”   
“And who says that?” Their feet are moving clumsily, but more from too much laughter than the apparent lack of coordination on both their parts. At some point during the night, Cas got it into his mind to finally teach Olivia how to dance. The only thing that he hadn’t realized, was that reading about dancing was one thing. Actually doing it was another thing all together.  
“Okay, okay, how does it go again?” She puts her hands on his shoulders to stop them, and Cas resets the two of them before teaching her the movements again.  
“It’s easy. Count to three, and move your feet in time. Like this,” He moves a little too early, and the two of them knock into each other, and Olivia steps onto his feet.  
“Sorry, sorry, sorry!” She gasps, and Cas rolls his eyes.  
“Sure. Now follow me.” Concentrating on the movement of their feet, Olivia picks up the dance easily within a few minutes. Before they know it, the two of them are twirling around the living room in the space provided by all the pushed back furniture. The music coming over the radio barely matches the dance they’re doing, but neither of them really care. The smile coming from her is enough to light up an entire town and still have some left over. Cas could get used to this, he thinks. He could get used to the sound of his niece laughing, and the way her eyes crinkle in the corner when she smiles. He could get used to the way the air around them doesn’t feel forced, or thick with the metaphorical elephant in the room. Like this, being with his niece is as easy as breathing.  
“We need to stop or I’m going to throw up.” She flops down onto the couch, and wipes her hand across her forehead in mock tiredness.   
“No one actually needs to know how to dance.”  
“You’re not exactly graceful, Olivia. But it is a rather practical skill.” She rolls her eyes and looks over at Sam, who’s trying very hard not to laugh.  
“Sure thing, Cas. Sure thing.”  
By the time they leave at the end of the summer, all of their skin has darkened considerably, and the freckles on Olivia’s face have spread across her shoulders and arms. She’s all but fluent in Spanish, and her hands and feet are rough from spending so much time on the beach. The Impala is covered in dust, and somehow the seats have escaped mostly unscathed from sand and saltwater. They cross back over the border, and are back in the bunker two weeks before Olivia starts her freshman year of high school at the only private school in the city.

 

“What the hell is this?” Sam thrusts a sheet of paper at Olivia’s sleeping form, and she slowly blinks her eyes a few times and squints at the paper.  
“If I had to guess, I’d say it’s a report card.”  
“Cut the sarcasm. You’re failing two classes. You want to tell me what’s going on?” Sam stares at her unblinkingly, and she just huffs and turns over.  
“It’s seven in the morning. Can’t this wait?”  
“No it can’t, Olivia. Now tell me what’s going on. You’re smarter than this. Straight C’s and D’s? That’s not you.” The combination of being woken up early on a Saturday and Sam’s complaints are enough to have her lashing out before she’s even fully awake.  
“Well maybe it is!” She explodes, her face flushed red with anger.  
“Maybe, I’m just not as smart as you and Cas seem to think. I’m failing. So what?”  
“So what? So what? I know for a fact that you’re a hell of a lot smarter than this.” She rolls her eyes, and for once, Sam doesn’t find it endearing, instead it just makes him even more pissed off. Flipping onto her back, she yanks the covers over her head, and makes a point of mumbling back a response.  
“Whatever.”  
“Fine. You’re grounded.”  
“You’re kidding me right?” The covers are whipped back, and shock appears on her face, and Sam picks up her report card and starts to leave.  
“That’s right. No phone, no going out. School, then home, every day until you get your grades back up. Don’t even think about trying to sneak out.”  
“It’s not like I have friends anyway,” She bites back, “have fun ruining what little life I do have.”  
“Stop being dramatic. You get your grades up, and you’re not grounded anymore.”  
“This is medieval! No one gets grounded by their parents anymore!” She shouts, waving her arms around. Sam can see the tears starting to gather in the corners of her eyes, but he just shuts the door behind him and leaves for work.  
Tears slowly leak out of the corners of Olivia’s eyes against her will. In the back of her mind, she knows Sam is more than right. She is smart. She knows Latin like the back of her hand, and can name at least a hundred different deities from multiple civilizations off the top of her head. By now, she can clean and put her Glock together faster than most soldiers probably can, and can shoot like Annie Oakley. She knows all the different ways to tell when someone is lying or hiding something, and can read people’s expressions with as much ease as a psychiatrist. But for some reason she can’t handle freshman geometry. Her brain stutters when it comes to graphing and formulas and finding out x’s and y’s. Biology makes zero to no sense, and besides that, Mr. Villegas isn’t exactly teacher of the year material. At least for English and geography she can scrape together a decent B when she actually bothers doing the work, which really isn’t too often if she’s being completely honest.  
The worst part is knowing that if she actually did take the time to pay attention or push through it, Olivia knew that she would be getting straight A’s. But that would be letting Sam know that he was right, and fuck that shit. The summer in Mexico seemed light years away even though it was just four months ago that they were inseparable. Now Sam and Cas just seemed to get their kicks from riding her ass about school until they all started screaming at each other and door slammed.  
So she does what Winchesters do best, and does the exact opposite of what her uncle wants. When her report card comes in nine weeks later, Olivia is successfully failing all seven of her classes, exactly one point below passing. The anger on Sam’s face almost makes it worth it.

Almost.

 

By February, they’re back to barely even speaking at all. Olivia refuses to have a birthday party, and stays locked in her room the entire day. Cas get so angry that he throws away the birthday cake he made her, and throws her presents into a pile in front of her door. He’s read about moody teenagers in so many different books, but there’s no manual for how to deal with your fifteen year old niece who barely comes out of her room.  
The next day, she leaves the house wearing the cross shaped necklace that he bought her. It’s the only sign she makes that she even acknowledged her birthday at all.

 

At the same time that her grades have hit an all time low, and Sam has given up on grounding her and just gave Olivia her phone back, and she slowly but surely begins to make friends for the first time.   
If they could even really be called that. They’re all seniors, and no one else at the small private school really even talks to them. The girls wear their uniform shirts short enough to show off pierced bellybuttons and the boys wear leather jackets to school in place of blazers, and smoke cigarettes in the parking lot at lunch.   
“You coming tonight?” Gemma, one of the nicer ones, asks Olivia, blowing more than a little bit of smoke into her face. She clutches onto the strap of her backpack, and shifts her weight from one foot to the other. School let out a while ago, but the crowd of people she’s been hanging out with litters the entire parking lot. She and Gemma are off to the sides, and she’s thankful that everyone else has stopped giving her weird looks. For a while, the anxiety of being somewhere she didn’t belong took over her entire body, and made her hands shake every time one of them so much as looked at her.  
“Yeah. Wouldn’t miss it.” She resists the urge to cough, even though her eyes water slightly. Gemma smiles, and the silver hoop on her lip glints in the sunlight.  
“Cool. We’ll pick you up at eleven. Bruno’s is going to be fucking sick tonight.” The name has been tossed around more than a couple of times, but she still doesn’t exactly know who this Bruno is. From what she’s gathered, he graduated last year, and has always thrown the best parties. Gemma talks about him the most, and Olivia has a sneaking suspicion that she has more than just a little bit of a crush on him.  
“What should I wear?” The cigarette pauses midway to Gemma’s red lips, and she flicks it away, glowing orange, into the parking lot before turning back to her.  
“Don’t worry. I’ll bring you something to wear,” she flips a hand, and pulls out her keys and unlocks the door to her car, “See you at eleven, O.”  
It was a nickname that she picked out herself. It wasn’t like she didn’t like the name Olivia, she did. But everyone in the group had cool names or nicknames that came from years of hanging out together. Names like Gemma, or Frida, or Razor. So when they first asked for her name, she ended up panicking and told them that her name was Olivia but everyone called her O, even though she couldn’t recall a single occasion in her lifetime where anyone had ever called her O. But Gemma and Frida nodded and said that it suited the little freshman, and from then on she was O.  
Olivia walks home, and slams her bedroom door behind her, engaging the lock. This was her first party, and she definitely didn’t need to remind everyone that she was a freshman.  
“Oh god.” She sucks in a breath. Everything is spinning and spinning with excitement and nerves, and by the time that dinner rolls around, she can barely contain her anxiety. Even trying to lift her fork up causes her to shake. Cas looks over to her, and turns his head that certain way that makes her feel like he can see straight through her.  
“Are you feeling alright, Olivia?” Probing blue eyes stare straight back at her, and suddenly her training of how to lie properly comes right back to her.  
“No. I’ve been feeling sick to my stomach all day.” The word roll off her tongue like they’re the whole truth and nothing but the truth with more than enough pity piled on. He reaches across the table and hold the back of his hand to her forehead, and the creases in his forehead pop up as a frown starts to take over his face.  
“You’re clammy. Why don’t you lie down for tonight? I’m home tonight, and Sam has to run to the office for a late meeting.” She exhales in a quick puff, and rushes to put her plate in the sink. Somehow it worked. And no one, and she means no one is able to lie to Cas, but for some god forsaken reason, he fucking bought her tiny little bullshit lie.  
In her room, the waiting begins to kill her. For a while she wonders if they were all just fucking with her about inviting her as a way to embarrass her. But Gemma has been nothing but completely genuine to her, and everyone else (especially Frida and Razor) have finally stopped giving her scathing looks, and have switched to endearing annoyance. Her worry then turns to the actual logistics of the situation. According to her watch, Sam is due to leave for his meeting in a little over twenty minutes, at which point Cas will most likely go to read in the library. He won’t try to bother her in her room, which eliminates the problem of getting caught. The only other possible hiccup in the plan is the fact that her room is on the second floor. And trying to sneak out the front door is just begging for Cas to find her.  
The tree next to her window makes it a lot easier.   
At first she tries reading to kill time. Then showering. Then watching a movie. By the time all that is done, it’s almost eleven, and her window rattles in its frame a couple of minutes after. Gemma is in the tree in all her glory, and as soon as the window is open, she tumbles in, giving Olivia a view of the scrap of fabric that she calls underwear. In a flash, she’s up, and the grin on her face lights up the entire room.  
“Long time no see, bitch. Alright let’s get you fucking dressed.” She dumps out the bulging contents of her purse, and throws a wad of black and white fabric at Olivia, whose eyes nearly pop out of her head when she holds it up.  
“Uh, Gemma, where’s the, um, rest of this?” In her hands are a pathetically tiny pleated white skirt, and a nearly see through black crop top.   
“Funny. Now put it on and let me do your makeup. And don’t you dare wear granny panties.” Olivia does what she’s supposed to, and yanks on the clothes before Gemma can catch too much of a glance at her body. The skirt barely covers her ass, and the more she pulls it down, the more skin is exposed either way. After a minute or two of fidgeting with it, she gives up, and sits down to let the other girl do her makeup. The kind of makeup that Gemma wears can be described in three adjectives: thick, pale, and black. Her eyes are perpetually lined in thick black eyeliner, and her skin sometimes appears so pale that it’s all but translucent. The overall effect is something both enchanting and intimidating at the same time. And Olivia would kill to look the same way.  
So she waits patiently as Gemma tells her to pout and close her eyes, and doesn’t try to blink too much when her eyes are lined.   
“Check it out, blondie.” When Olivia opens her eyes, she doesn’t recognize the girl in the mirror. She looks older, eyes staring and staring and staring, and all of her young girl freckles covered up. Her lips are full and pink, and the clothes that she had been given make her look like she’s trying to seduce anyone she meets. The way she looks in the mirror makes her feel stronger, like she could kiss someone, and then kill them at the drop of a hat, just like she’s been trained to do. The knowledge brings a smirk to her face, and adrenaline gushes through her veins.  
“Let’s rock this bitch.”


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warning for sexual violence.

It’s barely 1:00, and Olivia is fucking blasted. Never in her entire life has she even thought about consuming this much alcohol in a single occasion. Sure she’s had sips here and there, but nothing compared to this. And it all started with motherfucking Frida.  
That bitch had handed her a shot and a beer as soon as she walked through the door. With everyone looking at her, Olivia tossed back the shot without hesitating, and washed it down with her beer while trying not to wince too much. Gemma immediately started clapping, and dragged Bruno over to do another shot with them in celebration. The guy already looked fairly drunk even with her limited experience. But never the less, she tossed back another one. And another. And another.  
After the fourth shot and her second beer, she stops paying attention to what exactly she was drinking even though people just keep putting things into her hands. Her bones feel simultaneously light and heavy, and the shitty music suddenly didn’t seem quite so shitty. Heavy bass thrums through her body, and she can feel more than one pair of eyes tracking her movements around the house. She is able to recognize a lot of the kids from the group, and the rest are a mystery. They all look older, like they’re in college. Someone left an open bottle of vodka on the table, and she takes it and starts chugging before anyone can notice its sudden disappearance. By now the stuff just kind of tastes like water, and whenever someone she knows sees her, they start hooting and hollering like she’s performing a magic trick right in front of them.   
“You give me life, angel.” Gemma slings her arms around Olivia and draws her in close, smacking a sloppy kiss on her cheek. The room began to spin around her a long time ago, and every time she blinks, it feels like hours are passing by.  
“Take a puff of this.” Frida smirks and shoves a cigarette into Olivia’s hands, and there’s nothing she can do except robotically lift it to her mouth and inhale deeply. Wracking coughs take over her lungs within seconds, and it does nothing to help with her already queasy stomach. Everything is spinning and spinning again, and the music is too loud for thoughts to even cross her mind, and in one movement, she gathers what small amount of coordination she still possesses and charges outside, vomiting up the contents of her stomach. The smell is enough to make her drop down onto her knees and begin to dry heave; all the liquid already gone. Bile burns through her throat as she kneels on the ground and attempts to rid herself of poison that is no longer present.  
A hand winds its way through her thick blonde hair, and starts to rub her back as Olivia continues to try to choke up more vomit.   
“Everyone gets fucking wasted their first time. Welcome to the club bitch.” Sure enough, it’s motherfucking Frida behind her, holding her hair. Meanwhile, Gemma is nowhere to be found, and is most likely trying to bum cigarettes off of the drunker members of the party. It figures that this would happen to her the very first time she tries to sneak out. A stick of gum is shoved into her mouth, and she starts chewing out of reflex.  
“By the way, Crawford really wants to fuck you.” Her voice sounds a lot farther away than it should considering that she’s right next to Olivia, but she nods her head and manages to slur out a response.  
“M’ fuckin’ ready to scream.” Frida throws her head back and cackles, yanking Olivia’s limp body to her feet. It takes a few seconds for her to gather her bearings and realize that she’s standing up. She doesn’t feel anymore sober than she did when she took a puff of the cigarette, and the stick of gum in her mouth barely puts a dent in the nasty taste in her mouth, but she follows anyway when Frida begins to tug her back towards the thumping bass house. Sure enough, Crawford is standing in the corner, beer in hand. His eyes rove up and down her body in a way that normally would have made her skin crawl and her stomach heave, but this time she doesn’t feel anything at all. It’s the clothes’ doing. There hasn’t been a single time that Crawford, or any of the boys like him have spared her a glance, but now that she’s covered in a pathetic excuse for a tank top and skirt, she’s just another prize to be won.  
Approaching slowly, Crawford leans in close to her; too close. She can smell the liquor on his breath, and the mere thought of it makes her stomach take a nasty turn. Olivia whips her head around, hoping to see Frida or Gemma or someone to escape with. But she’s stuck.  
“You wanna get out of here?” Words stick in the back of her throat, and he soon takes her silence as a yes. A wicked grin spreads across his face, and he throws an arm around her, guiding her up the stairs. The steps seem to keep going on and on, and when they finally reach the top, she looks at him with hooded eyes and sways on her feet. Black spots edge into the peripherals of her vision, and she regains her balance in slow motion.  
“God, you’re so fuckin’ sexy lookin’ at me like that.” He opens one of the doors to a bedroom with the owner obviously missing, and locks the door shut behind them. Her mouth opens and closes, and she wants to say something; like fuck this or get the hell away from me you pervert, but the words just seem so far away in her mind as he yanks off her shirt, hooting when he discovers her lack of a bra. Her nipples harden of their own accord when the cold air hits them, and a shiver takes over her. Falling back onto the bed, she wraps her arms around her breasts, like maybe that will keep him from doing what she knows is going to be coming up soon.  
“Knew you were just a dirty little skank like the rest of them.” A whimper escapes her mouth when he rips her underwear off and begins to unbuckle his pants. She’s completely exposed to him. In the back of her mind, she’s screaming. Her entire life up until this point she has been trained to defend herself from monsters she has never encountered. And now that there’s one right in front of her, she has no idea what to do. His lips press roughly against her, clanking their teeth together. The taste of beer, cheap whiskey, and cigarettes fill her mouth, and she knows that Crawford can taste the thinly veiled vomit on her breath, but he doesn’t seem to care. Their lips move together clumsily as he crawls onto the bed, settling on top of her. There’s a noticeable bulge in his boxers, and he begins to grind his hips into her with a disjointed sort of rhythm. In another moment in time, it probably would have felt good, and Olivia would have been a more willing participant. But right now she doesn’t know pleasure from the churning in her stomach.  
He reaches down, and runs two, or maybe three, fingers against her core. They come away glistening, and he groans loudly as he sucks on them.  
“You taste good, baby.” Finally words find there way into her mouth.  
“C-Crawford-“, He cuts her off and takes the sound of his name coming from her mouth as desire, and takes off the final barrier between them.  
It’s long and thick, and once he rolls a condom on, it only takes a second for him to push into her. Olivia cries out at the pain of the intrusion, and feels a give, and then a rush of blood. Pain. Thrusts come quickly, and she’s whimpering and crying and he just won’t stop. Every time he pushes back in it hurts more, and he keeps telling her that she’s so damn tight, and that she’s the prettiest little slut he’s fucked in a long time, and all she wants is for him to stop. Finally he gives one more jarring, teeth-rattling thrust, shoving her higher onto the bed, and then he collapses onto her. Sweat is pouring off of him in rivulets, and he has sated the monster inside of him, if only for a minute.  
Eventually he rolls off of her, and throws the condom away. He dresses and pays no attention to the frozen girl on the bed, naked as the day she was born. Numbness begins to creep it’s way through her blood stream, and she wants to be anywhere but here more desperately than she’s ever wanted anything before. The door closes again at some point, and the sound echoes like a gunshot through the room. Olivia continues to lie there, the last hour replaying through her head on a loop.  
Slowly, she picks herself up. Mechanically, and somewhat out of habit, she dresses herself with rubber arms. She laces up her Docs, and walks out of the room, shutting the events of the entire night in the bedroom of someone she doesn’t even know.

 

Sobs wrack through her body, and Olivia desperately tries to prevent herself from breaking into girl-sized pieces. The water is scalding hot, and no matter how much she has scrubbed at her body, she still feels filthy. All of her skin is bright red, and the water makes it burn even more, but she doesn’t care. In her mind, she knows what happened to her.  
Rape. The word is itself is something she’s only really heard about in the news. Always some other poor girl. Wrong place, wrong time. But never her.  
Something dark wells up in the pit of her stomach. It’s ugly, and she knows it. It tastes a little bit like the evil worries she used to read about all the demons and angels she read in Chuck’s prophecy all those years ago. And it scares her a little, but in that darkness, she can also sense a little bit of power. There is no longer anything that anyone can take from her. Next time, she will be stronger. She’ll fight him until he’s the one bleeding and begging for her to stop. And then she’s going to make him hurt some more. She will make him hurt and bleed and beg until he feels the same nothingness that she felt when he took what was not his to take.  
And she’s going to enjoy it.


	11. Chapter 11

Nights come and go in waterfalls, and before long it seems like every night Olivia is crawling back through her window at some obscenely early hour, reeking of cigarettes and liquor, and sometimes of other things. She’ll wake up for school, ten minutes before her bus arrives, and go to school; sleep through all her classes, throw up her lunch, and hang out with everyone in the parking lot chain-smoking cigarettes. Then at night, she’ll sneak out, and repeat the next day.  
Sam and Cas are blind to it, as per usual. They’re smart, but Olivia is smarter. They expect more from her – James Bond style escapes with no clues to her whereabouts. So she does the exact opposite, because no hunter will see what is directly in front of them. Especially not their niece sneaking out and in at all hours of the night.  
In the months following that first night, there is a visible change in her. The days of dressing in a way that attracted the smallest amount of attention possible are gone. In their place are the days of dressing for that attention. Her clothes get shorter and tighter and darker. She starts wearing her uniform the same way that all the other girls wear it; her shirt cut off to show her stomach, and her skirt just short enough to reveal the tops of her thighs when she walks. The vast majority of her closet expands to include mostly darker colors, and more than one pair of well loved platforms and Doc Martens. Her new friends applaud her new choice in clothing, but for the most part it just leaves her uncles scratching their heads. Their niece has begun to dress more like she’s entering her twenties; not turning sixteen soon. Sometime they catch themselves not recognizing the girl that walks down the stairs in dark makeup and revealing clothing as the same little girl that they raised from infancy.  
They still make an effort to train her every Saturday. There’s less talking, and more sparring, and there’s a glint in Olivia’s eye now that makes Cas’s blood run cold every time he encounters it. As per her insistence, he begins to teach her how to use the angel blade. It dredges up memories as old as the beginning of the universe; of the times when he himself was learning to use it. He drills her over and over again, never once letting up on the intensity of the moves he teaches her. Somewhere deep inside of him, he can feel their already weak connection going dim. So if this is the last time he is able to be close with Olivia, he’s going to make it worth it. There are times where he pushes probably too hard, and he gives her more than little gashes; but she always makes sure to return the favor, and comes back with twice the ferocity.   
On Olivia’s end, however, she doesn’t even recognize herself when she looks in the mirror anymore. As a matter of fact, she tries to avoid them whenever possible. She knows from all the different lore that mirrors have always been seen as a portal of some kind, and this time she’s scared of what she’s actually going to see when she looks in one. The anger that was present a few months ago has died out, and all that she’s left with is that bitter sadness that just leaves a bad taste in her mouth no matter how much she drinks. On the days where she feels everything at once, it feels like there are mousetraps inside of her, and they are all closing at once. Then there’s the days where she is sure that there is nothing in the world that will ever be able to bring feeling back into her hollow bones. She’s seen the scars on Frida’s wrists, and three weeks before Thanksgiving, she decides that she has nothing to lose and copies her. Having barely had any experience actually slicing something and not just sparring, the feeling of being on both the giving and receiving end is strange. For the first time, there’s a way to express whatever the fuck has been bottled up inside of her. And for the first time in a long time, it helps her feel something, even if that something is pain. And she’s damn okay with that. Everything that’s happened in the past five years has left her fucked up. Hacking away at her legs isn’t going to do much more damage.  
Neither one of her Uncle’s ask questions when she asks for different types of knives. Sam’s advice is the most helpful, and all he tells her is to go down to the weapons storage in the bunker and take whatever she wants. Down there she finds more than she could’ve dreamed of. Butterfly knives, serrated blades, switchblades; everything you could possibly want was down there. And she was going to put all her new additions to good work.

 

“Try it, O. It’ll just make everything go away, I promise.” The circle of people around all watch her with hawk eyes, just waiting to see if she’s going to go through with it. The rolled up twenty dollar bill in Razor’s hand looks both intimidating and all too inviting, and she finds herself reaching for it before she has the chance to think it through. The thing about drugs is, once you cross that line into the real ones; heroin, meth, coke, there is no going back. The tray sitting on the table holds two lines of white powder, thick and long. As she leans down, index covering her left nostril and pinky up (just like they had shown her), she pauses to wonder if this changes anything. If this truly makes her the problem child. Sure her grades have fallen, and she’s starting to dress like a street walker, but this can’t actually mean that she’s no good-  
“What are you waiting for? Those lines aren’t getting any longer.”  
In one movement, she bends down, and inhales, hard. It burns, and she rubs desperately at her nose to stop it. The few people in the circle cheer, and fueled by their acceptance, Olivia bends down, and rips straight through the second line without a second thought. She doesn’t really feel any different; not until a few minutes later. Only then does it hit her like a brick wall. This is what she’s been searching for this entire year. This feeling of actually being able to feel for once is intoxicating. She’s young and beautiful, and can get anyone in the world to do just about anything she wants. It’s unfamiliar territory that’s terrifying and exciting and feels like someone pressed the fast forward button on her brain.  
Three days later, she buys an eightball and starts snorting a bump whenever she feels down. Her new medicine is good for a while, and then, just like it always does, everything starts to go to shit.

 

“You’re all set to go?” Olivia rolls her eyes and lifts her bag onto her shoulder. The cover story of going over to Gemma’s family’s cabin for a week was a pretty solid one. Sam and Cas were both just happy to get her out of the house, and telling them that she was going to be having a Harry Potter marathon was way better than telling them what the hell she was actually going to be up to. The real answer was much worse.  
“Yeah. I’ll be fine. Harry Potter can only get so intense,” Cas opens the front door and after giving both of them a hug, Olivia starts to leave.  
“I’ll call you when I’m over there!” Frida drives up and puts her car in park, Gemma in the passenger seat. She told them minimal details, of course. Telling them she was going to go see a guy in Kansas City for a week, and that she would call them when she needed to be picked up from the bus station. Being the good friends that they are, neither one of them asks any questions when she asks them to keep her phone for the week, and just tells her to use a condom. There’s a fuckton of things in her bag, and condoms aren’t one of them. All she has in her bag is a couple of changes of clothes, dead man’s blood in syringes, a couple of knives, and a machete.  
At the bus station, she jacks one of the cars as quickly as she can, and starts the sixteen hour drive all the way to Kansas City.

 

She arrives the warehouse around three in the afternoon. After having spent weeks researching the recent disappearances and attacks in the area, she was positive that it could only be vampires. About four of them, according to her research. She’s armed to the teeth with syringes of dead man’s blood, and has the family machete strapped firmly to her leg. Any sane first time hunter would’ve chosen something like a salt and burn for their first hunt, but not her. She’s a motherfucking Winchester with a death wish a mile wide. So she pours out two lines and rails them before she walks in because a little extra courage never hurt anyone.   
Decapitating the first vamp is easier than she expected, truthfully. The blade makes a sickening crunching noise as it swipes through her neck. She does it as quietly as possible, motioning at the victims to shut up. The poor women are barely much older than she is, and chained to the mattresses in the warehouse. Anger fuels her determination, and she’s able to slice off another one’s head just as the vamps are trying to scream to alert the others. The third and fourth charge her. Pulling out a syringe and stabbing one in the neck is second nature, and she kicks the other vamp back long enough to inject the blood into the first. The she-bloodsucker screams in agony just as a wicked grin overcomes Olivia’s features.   
That ends as soon as she’s wretched back by her blonde hair and thrown onto the ground. The other vamp recovered from the kick a lot quicker than she thought, and he’s closing in on her fast. Think, O, think. The hand to hand training that Sam taught her comes back in an instant, and she rolls to the side when he tries to jump her, fangs fully extended. Using her elbow, she twists sharply and cracks down on his back, and brings the blade down in an arc at the base of his skull hard enough that the sound of metal on concrete echoes through the buildings. The last one is cowering in the corner, her hands clutching at the spot on her neck where Olivia injected the poison. She too looks young, but that’s relative. Vampires are fucking immortal anyway.  
“You’ll die you fucking bitch-“ Olivia cuts her off with one last smooth swipe of the machete. The head rolls until it lands at her feet, the fangs still extended in the mouth. Nasty sight, but she gives it a kick to the side, swallows up the feeling of disgust, and heads over to release the victims.

 

“I wasn’t here. Go to the police and make sure they get you home okay?” All the girls are still shaking out of shock, but one or two manage to nod their heads. The oldest one, in her late twenties, walks forward, throwing her arms around Olivia. The gesture takes her by surprise but she returns it anyway.  
“We’d be dead without you, you know.” Kissing the girl on the cheek, she pulls away, and takes a receipt and a pen out of the glove box.  
“Don’t worry about it. This is my work number. Catch wind of something like this, give me a call okay?” The girl shoves it into her pocket and throws her arms around the other ones.  
“What’s your name anyway? You seem pretty young to be doing the whole killing monsters thing all the time.” Olivia snorts and gives them a wave. If only they knew the truth.  
“Yeah, I probably am. Name’s Olivia Winchester.”


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is probably one of the most emotional chapters in this whole story. I wrote this at a really low point in my life when I was in a very similar situation. Trigger warning for self harm, suicide, and general sadness. Grab your fucking tissues.

Olivia is fourteen when she decides that she wants to die. She is seventeen when she finally gets the guts to go through with it.  
The decision surges through her like a door slamming shut. This is the final answer. Cas and Sam will be sad of course. They’ll be devastated at losing the closest thing either of them has ever had to a family. But they’ll get over it eventually. And her father - well, he should have seen this one coming. He can’t just up and leave his family like they’re nothing. And he certainly can’t just abandon his own fucking daughter. God, she fucking hopes this haunts him for the rest of his life. She hopes that he feels the pain of this loss the same way that she felt it six years ago. This is just the best solution. It’s the only way this can end really. No more missing the warmth of her father’s embrace. No more sorry excuses for having a family. Just the closing of a book.  
She decides to make it as messy a possible. Maybe it’s the desire to know that she’s going to be staining the white bathroom tub for years to come. Maybe it’s just a final wish that if her father comes back, he’ll get to see exactly what she’s done. Either way, the end is still achieved. She waits until a night when she knows Sam will be working late, just like every single night of the past few years, and Cas takes the odd night at the library. The bunker is so empty that it echoes when Olivia’s feet walk across the floor. It’s too quiet.   
She draws the bath too hot. Hot enough that her skin turns bright sunburn pink when she steps in. The knife that Cas got her for her birthday a couple of years ago rests on the edge. For a while she just lies there. Time slows down, and every second that ticks by is starting to seem like years at a time. Her skin grows numb.  
Flash. She’s in the library with Dean.  
Flash. She’s at school and Sam is late again.  
Flash. They’re in Mexico.  
Flash. She’s learning to fight and shoot and kill.  
Flash. She can rattle off Latin like it’s her job.  
Flash. Blood.  
She’s just so done with it all. He’s never coming back. He left her like it didn’t even matter that she was his own flesh and blood. And she tried to fill up that void. No one can say that she didn’t try. She tried to be the perfect daughter, the perfect niece. She tried to be invisible. She tried to just be a fucking problem and even that didn’t bring him back. She snorted enough coke to hold over several addicts, took reams of acid, sliced her legs to shit. She even tried to find some kind of purpose in saving people from monsters. None of it worked. All because Olivia doesn’t even matter. She’s nothing.  
It takes ten seconds. Ten seconds for her to take the knife off the edge, flick out the blade, and bring it down. Two cuts. Each deep enough that she’s cut well beyond the fat layer, and straight into the muscle. All the anger, and all those days of training for monsters that she’s never even seen, and she sliced through her own skin with such ease that she would have been scared if she was thinking straight.  
Blood surges out. It takes all of a couple of seconds for the water to turn pink, and then a deep red. Her head goes fuzzy, and she wonders if the sound of the door slamming is real, or something from her imagination.   
Olivia’s head dunks under the stained water. Her wrists hang out of the tub. Her vision goes black at the corners, and takes over completely.  
That’s when the screaming starts.

 

Olivia floats in and out after that. There’re flashes where she thinks that she could be in an ambulance. Other times the only thing she can see is white. It’s the waking up that kills her the most.

 

“Extensive scarring.” Snippets of conversation are starting to reach her ears, but opening her eyes feels far enough away that she knows she won’t be seeing anything anytime soon.

“Sliced almost down to the tendons.”

“Almost all of her blood.”

“Antipsychotic medications.”

“Shouldn’t be alive.”

And she still was.

 

On the third day, Olivia opens her eyes to the world for the second time.   
Sure enough, she’s in a hospital room. On her right, she’s hooked up to a heart monitor, making sense of the several adhesive patches on her chest. There’s an IV settled into the crook of her elbow, neatly taped down and dripping fluid into her empty veins. Someone has already changed her into an ugly, scratchy blue hospital gown, and covered her with an equally uncomfortable blanket. When she glances down at her forearms, her immediate response is to start gagging.  
Calling them cuts is the understatement of the century. They’re lacerations, running the length of her forearm. They’re ugly and slightly jagged, and the stitches and staples holding them together look like they’re barely helping to do their job. The white bandage that’s taped over it already is stained with blood the color of rust. She doesn’t realize that her entire body is shaking until she can feel Sam’s firm hands on her shoulders.  
“Olivia! It’s okay. I’m here.”  
The sound of his voice manages to reach her ears, but her body continues to shake in his arms. It should’ve worked, and it didn’t. She failed at the one thing that should have been all too easy. Drops of water drip down onto her legs before she can even comprehend the fact that she’s crying. Her green eyes are pouring out so much water at once that her face feels drenched in seconds. It feels like something is squeezing her heart and just won’t let go this time. It hurts so badly in her chest that she begins to wail. The sound echoes off the wall and rings into Sam’s ears so deeply that he knows he will never forget it. Olivia starts to thrash in his arms, clawing her fingernails against the IV that’s stuck in her arm until she manages to slip through and grab hold of the plastic tubing, and yanks the needle out of her arm. Deep red drops of blood seep out and run down her arm and onto Sam’s. It makes him sick to see her blood on him.  
“We need help in here!” The door bangs open as soon as the words are out of his mouth, and the nurse from the front desk looks into the room for all of two seconds before she runs straight back out again, only to return in seconds. In her hands is a needle, filled with a clear fluid. The doctor is right behind her. Sam tightens the cage of his arms, and forces Olivia down against the hospital bed while the nurse stabs the IV back into her vein. Sam looks away while they inject whatever drug they decided to use to sedate the love of his entire life. Only once her body stops fighting and her eyes shut does he allow himself to start sobbing too.

Only then.

 

She wakes up when the sky is completely dark, and both of her uncles are asleep in the chairs in her room. In an attempt to get up, she tries to raise her arms, only to find that they have been Velcro-ed to the rails of the bed at both wrists. The metallic clanging sound she makes manages to wake up the two men sitting in the chairs, even though there are bags under their eyes, and they both look like they have aged ten years, and could easily do with ten more years worth of sleep.  
Cas wakes up first, and his eyes widen when he sees Olivia trying to work her way out of the cuffs.  
“Don’t you dare, Olivia Samantha. Don’t. You. Dare.” The desperate pleading look she gives him makes him want to give in.  
“Cassie please, I didn’t mean to do it, I promise! I won’t do it again. I was being stupid. Please take these off!” She begs him, shaking her wrists for emphasis. Sam walks ahead of him, and the breath that he was holding takes all the air in his lungs. He has to be strong for Olivia and for Cas.  
“Enough. The social worker will be here soon, and we’ll figure out what to do from there.” Olivia can’t help but notice how neither one of them is looking her in the eye, even as she rapidly alternates who she’s staring at. At that same moment, the door pops open, and a too cheerful woman walks in. Her smile is too cheerful for the time or occasion, and the stack of papers she dumps on the table all have Olivia’s name on them. Nothing about the atmosphere she walked in on seems to deter her from going on with her duties.  
“So, Miss Olivia, how are we today?” Even the way she asks the fucking question pisses Olivia off, and she automatically bites back at the perceived threat.  
“Totally great. Considering that I tried to kill myself and am now tied to my hospital bed and everything, you know.” The response was obviously not what the blonde was expecting, because she looks exactly like she’s just swallowed the world’s foulest tasting food.  
“Well, I um, apologize about the circumstances. However, we do have to discuss what kind of action to take from here-”  
“And what exactly would that be? I’m not a child, you can’t just stuff me into some institution and leave me there to rot! I’m seventeen years old!” Olivia’s face flushes completely red as she becomes more and more irate at her words. There’s no way in fucking hell that they’re sending her away. They’re all going to go home and pretend that nothing ever happened, and that they’re a normal family, just like they’ve been doing ever since her father left. Everything will be perfectly fine, and Olivia will continue the puking and stuffing, and slicing her legs to total and complete shit, and constantly getting high on anything she can get her hands on. She will be able to come home at four in the morning and neither one of them will care.  
“What exactly is the recommendation?” The social worker looks relieved to be free of Olivia’s wrath for the time being, and looks to Cas with something akin to adoration. Papers are shuffled around until she finds the one that she’s looking for.  
“Normally we recommend going home if this was not a suicide attempt, but given the nature of your wounds, and the fact that they were self-inflicted, we recommend that she go to an acute care hospital, where your niece will be under more supervision that cannot be provided in the home. With your permission, we would like to go ahead and start with transporting her to another facility.” Cas looks away completely, and the only sound in the room comes from Olivia fidgeting in the hospital bed. Between all the struggles that have taken place with her, both of her arms have started to bleed again. The social worker presses the button to alert the nurses and continues like she does this everyday.  
“Find her a bed wherever there’s room.” Sam reaches for the pen that he’s offered, and signs his only niece’s soul away to some hospital for psychos.  
“Sammy.” That one word breaks his whole heart. He’s heard it so many different ways - coming home in excitement to show him a drawing, skinned knees, and saying that she loves him. But he’s never heard it quite like this before. Never gut-wrenchingly, completely, and totally heartbroken. But then again, so is he. And he’s willing to do whatever it takes to keep her alive, even if it means that she hates him when it’s all said and done. The silence in the room that follows presses in on all sides. It makes Olivia feel even smaller. Vulnerable even.  
“Alright. I’ll place the call for an ambulance. Nurses will go ahead and come in to assist her with getting dressed. After that, we’ll do one final check and remove the IV. Anything else?” The entire process takes less than fifteen minutes. She interviews Olivia to make sure it was a suicide attempt, even though there’s no question about it. After that, they disconnect her from all the different machinery, and two overweight nurses come in and make sure she doesn’t try to kill herself while she changes. Under the harsh fluorescent lighting, it becomes painfully obvious that her legs are completely covered in scars. It also becomes obvious how much weight she’s lost in more recent times. All of the vertebrae on her spine stand out like marbles when she bends over, and Olivia hurries through the entire process just to avoid seeing herself in the mirror.  
“All ready?” Sam asks, and she just stares at him and keeps walking towards the exit. Eyes empty and devoid of all emotion, she walks straight faced to the ambulance, and maintains the same expression as they strap her down. For all he knows, she might have just been waiting in line, not going to a psychiatric care hospital.  
They don’t see her for eight days.


End file.
